vendredi, 23 janvier 2015

Recent events have underlined once again that Islam is dangerously incompatible with what many refer to as Western values. The murder of several employees of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo is a violent reminder of this fact.

But it is interesting that some commentators (myself included[3]) are starting to notice that the “Western values” represented by the likes of Charlie Hebdo are actually completely at odds with anything that could be considered authentically European. Arktos Media’s new translation of Guillaume Faye’s Sex and Deviance is a welcome and timely contribution to this ongoing discussion. Faye is clear that Islam’s anachronistic attitudes towards sex and sexuality are explosively at odds with Western sexual mores, and furthermore that the West’s current sexual mores are themselves a deviation from traditional Western values. His insistence that the individualism of Christianity is at the root of the West’s present sexual ennui is likely to make this book as controversial with social conservatives as it will be with the Islamophiliac left.

Faye’s central concern is the decline of the family and the consequent reduction in the European birth rate. This is the touchstone to which all of his judgments return. If something is judged to be harmful to the birth rate then it is harmful per se. But this focus leads to some surprising conclusions, particularly his relaxed attitude to homosexuality, a subject of some division on the outer reaches of the right. Faye says that his judgement is guided by the Aristotelian mean and this allows him to seek a balanced and healthy path between, on the one hand sexual moralism, and on the other sexual incontinence.

Faye places the family at the center of his discussion because it is the necessary and best developed means of continuing the lineage. The irresistible trend of recent decades has been to undermine the stability of the family in favor of individualistic pleasure seeking. This has resulted in fewer marriages and fewer births as individuals rotate amongst a series of sterile sexual relationships. The properly conjugal element in sexual relationships has largely disappeared and this is something that fatally disrupts the social primacy that should be accorded to reproduction. For Faye, “The couple is not an isolated romantic duo but the central pillar in the architectural structure of a family” (26).

But in order to strengthen this structure he does not advocate a return to conservative family values as such. Or rather, he does and he doesn’t. What he wants is a candid recognition that there are several different types of love (sexual, familial, romantic, etc.) and that they have become confused and conflated in detrimental ways. He regards the bourgeois family as the model of a balanced and secure framework within which to rear children. But crucially, he is alive to the necessary hypocrisies that exist within that model and that allow it to function. In this sense, he argues for a distinction between conjugal love and sexual love, the latter (in the form of adultery or prostitution) being necessary for the former to function well. Not surprisingly, he thinks that such an outlet for sex outside of marriage is more necessary to men than women, although he allows for the latter case.

To some this will smack of a deft form of doublethink, allowing for conjugal fidelity to be maintained by excluding sexual infidelity from the reckoning. A smart excuse for priapic intellectuals. But it must be admitted that there is a strong element of pragmatic sexual Realpolitik to it. What made it possible in centuries past was the strong taboo against discussing sexual matters openly. This is why (as Faye correctly notes) divorce was always much more scandalous than adultery; it was socially unacceptable, whereas infidelity remained outside the purview of society. In the present context where no one can ever shut up about their own sexual concerns for more than five minutes at a stretch, it is difficult to see how such a form of necessary hypocrisy could endure. What is essential for its operation is a certain discretion concerning sexual matters, so that they do not emerge into explicit discourse. And this is surely why so many taboos are enforced so strictly. Once an explicit argument is made for such a system then its hidden aspects are brought to the fore, destroying the division between private and public. None of which means that adultery is any less prevalent now, simply that its effects are experienced as devastating rather than being kept out of mind.

In his discussion of homosexuality Faye carefully distinguishes between the practice itself and the promotion of homosexuality as an ideological norm that is being used to undermine the family. Although he sees male (though interestingly, not female) homosexuality as a pathology, it is not in itself a particularly harmful one. By contrast, the ideological exploitation of homosexuality, and issues such as gay marriage, are pernicious dogmas that actively undermine and devalue the importance of the family: “Homosexual unions will always remain a marginal phenomenon with few demographic effects, practically none of which will have any influence on the biological composition of Europeans. Moreover, as is the case with everything that is against nature, the homosexual couple does not last. Gay marriage only poses a problem because it is part of an ideological (not biological) dissolution of the natural order” (60).

As evidence for the pathological nature of homosexuality, Faye notes the narcissism of the various “pride” marches held around the world: “Why be ‘proud’ of being homosexual or bisexual?” he asks, noting that such displays betray a “deep infantilism. One can be proud of what one has become, of what one does, of one’s capacities, but to declare oneself proud of one’s sexual orientation is to set the bar for pride pretty low” (51). Despite this, Faye is entirely tolerant of any sort of homosexual or bisexual practice carried out in private. His concern is only with the ideological use to which such tendencies are being put. Regardless of whatever views one might have on the subject, Faye’s arguments are consistent, honest and balanced. It is telling, and very depressing, that his discussion of homosexuality is prefaced with the following remark: “In saying these things, of course, I am conscious of contravening the laws which limit freedom of expression in France” (46).

When Faye describes homosexuality as “against nature” he does so from a biological, rather than a moral perspective. But Christianity is quite different. It sees homosexuality as morally wrong because the individual is deviating from nature. And here Faye identifies the fundamental problem with Christianity, and the root cause of our present sexual confusion. Faye points out that Christianity condemns individual lapses such as homosexuality but is perfectly content with collective lapses such as racial blending. In fact, Christianity has nothing to say about the racial mixing of different peoples and Faye contrasts this with his own preferred Aristotelian view which tolerates individual predilections such as homosexuality, but forbids collective aberrations such as relations between distinct peoples. The problem with the Christian viewpoint is that it sees man as superior and distinct from the rest of nature. Faye terms this “anthropological irrealism” (263). Rather than existing within a wider contextualizing spectrum of natural evolution, man is seen as a special case. It is an error that, in its secular form, has led to the present obsession with equality. All people are sacred and therefore all people are equal. In that case, then, communal concerns become irrelevant when considering who to marry; instead, one should just follow one’s heart and marry whomever one becomes infatuated with, regardless of any wider considerations.

The other religion that Faye pays close attention to is Islam. For the purpose of his discussion, the important distinction between the two is that Christianity is an insidious corrosive that rots from within, whereas Islam is a wholly alien faith that can only cause explosive conflict. Faye is clear that the reason for Islam’s radically alien character is racial rather than spiritual. Religion emerges from a particular people and embodies their existing characteristics. What shouldn’t be surprising is that the importation of large numbers of Muslims who have very, very different notions of gender relations into post-feminist, sexually-liberationist European countries will be a disaster. That political leaders of all stripes are unable (or unwilling) to see this is to their eternal shame.

No doubt, if Faye had written his book a couple of years later he would have made some reference to the Rotherham scandal. Over a period of 16 years at least 1400 (a conservative estimate) white girls were sexually abused (including being drugged and raped, and trafficked) by Pakistani men whilst the authorities did their best to cover up the crimes. The reason for the cover up essentially boils down to a fear of being called racist. Some social workers insisted that the rapists were actually the girls’ boyfriends (despite the fact that the girls were children and the men were clearly several years older), whilst a Home Office researcher who did make reference to the rapists’ ethnicity was warned never to do so again and was sent on a diversity course as penance. The whole sordid affair illustrates Faye’s assertion that, “the media only emphasize ‘sex monsters’ of Gallic origin. The goal is to provide aid and comfort to the propaganda which says that sex crimes (and other crimes) ‘come from all milieus’” (206). Post-Rotherham we can confidently add that politicians and police will actively assist the media in covering up such crimes. The attested reality of Rotherham suggests that Faye is not overestimating the scale of the problem.

Despite some of Faye’s controversial views it is obvious that his concern is largely for protecting such victims from unnecessary predation. He writes, “we should consider the daily unhappiness of these young girls and adolescent boys . . . who get up every morning to go to school and who have to confront the barbarians, sensing that they are not protected by the authorities of their own country (marshmallows who have abdicated all responsibility) and without the young men of their own nation – unmanly, fearful, unworthy of their ancestors – daring to defend them” (164). He also makes the valuable observation that, “the life of a woman, especially a young woman, counts for more than that of a man . . . simply because she is a mother, in charge of reproduction and the upbringing of offspring” (119).

Such observations reveal Faye to be in total opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that will do nothing to protect our women and children, and that will, in an outrageous inversion, identify you as a hateful extremist if you speak in favor of such protection.

This is a radical book in many respects. Even its insistence on a division between private and public is radically at odds with a social norm that has outsourced domestic life to various media, social networks and other technologies. Above all, Faye has written a book that seeks to redress the imbalance of modern sexual mores and to install the family once more at the heart of such considerations. It also seeks to reinstate the virtue of communal considerations above purely individual ones. These aspirations transcend any ideology, whether of the left or the right, because they are attuned with biology and nature. Such wisdom is surprisingly hard to come by nowadays; Sex and Deviance should be read by anyone who seeks it.

jeudi, 01 janvier 2015

Guillaume Faye: Sex and Deviance

Sex and Deviance is at once a raging critique of the values underpinning contemporary Western societies and a down-to-earth, pragmatic vision of the future. Guillaume Faye is meticulous in his analysis of the points at which Western societies have deviated from their golden mean, thus having triggered the tidal wave of social ills that they are facing and can expect to face. Faye identifies at the centre of this vortex the matter of sex and sexuality, and with this proffers an answer to the perennial question: What is the glue that holds societies together?

Faye’s penetrating assault on the specious thinking of ideologues is certain to rattle the convictions of those from across the spectrum. Much more than just a socio-political exposition, this book is an invitation to shed old ways of thinking and to begin new, hard-headed discussion over the most pertinent issues of this century.

1. Funeral Dirge for the Family The Disappearance of the Lasting Couple Fragility of Unions Based on Romantic Love The Politisation of Love: Symptom of Neo-Totalitarianism Love is Not a Gift, but a Calculation The Decline of the Duty to Continue the Lineage Supremacy of the Anti-Familial Ideology Consequences of the Deterioration of the Monogamous Couple The Destruction of the Bourgeois Family Results in Chaos Polyamory, Polygamy, Polyfidelity: Toward Involution Spoiled Child, Sick Child

2. The Sacralisation of Homosexuality Homophile Ideology and the ‘Struggle against Homophobia’ The Pathology of Homosexual Discourse and the Homosexual Mentality The Egoism, Egotism, and Superficiality of ‘Gay Culture’ Proselytising the Gay Religion Psychopathology and Fraud of the Male Homosexual Couple The Psychology of Homosexuality The Real Aim of the Fight against Homophobia Are Gays Really...Gay? The Innocence of Lesbians: Female Homosexuality Are We All Bisexual? The Delirium of Homoparentality Homophobia among ‘Youths’ Gender Theory: The Latest Whim of Homosexualist and Feminist Ideology

3. Males and Females: Complex Differences Woman’s Deep Psychology and Archetypical Representations Questions about the Dependence and Submission of Women Questions on Male Superiority and the ‘Dominant Male’ Effeminisation and Devirilisation of Society Different Ways the Sex Act Is Perceived Between Men and Women The Rising Power of Women Today Women’s Revenge and the Possible Reversal of Sexual Polarity The Unisex Utopia The Dialectics of Double Domination Love, Money, and Interest

4. Feminist Schizophrenia The Insurmountable Contradictions of Feminism The Two Feminisms: Sane and Insane The Androgynous Utopia The Dogma of ‘Parity’ Feminism and Careerism The Feminisation of Values

5. The Farce of Sexual Liberation An Ideology of Puritans The False Promises of Sexual Liberation The Illusion of Virtual Encounters

6. Sex and Perversions Sexual Obsession and Sexual Impoverishment Asexuals and the Extinction of Desire: Fruits of Hypersexualism Immodesty as Anti-Eroticism The Sexual Destructuration of Adolescents Rapes, Sex Crimes, and Judicial Laxity The Explosion in Sexual Violence by Minors Violence and Sexism at School Minors Having Abortions Female Victims of Violence: Organised Dishonesty The Suffering of Women in Immigrant Neighbourhoods To Be a Homophobe is Prohibited; To Be a Paedophile is Permissible

8. Sex and Origin The Pressure for ‘Mixed’ Couples and Unions The Race-Mixing Imperative, Soft Genocide, and Preparing the Way for Ethnic Chaos Miscegenation as Official State Doctrine Different Sexualities Sexual Violence and Sexual Racism Sexual Ethnomasochism and Divirlisation Birthrates and Ethnic Origin

9. Islam and Sex The Contradiction of Sexual Permissiveness in the Face of Islam Macho Nervous Schizophrenia Misogyny and Gynophobia

10. Christianity and Sex The Canonical Sexual Morality of the Church Failure of the Sexual and Conjugal Morality of the Church Christian Sex-Phobia Has Provoked Sex-Mania by way of Reaction From Sexual Sin to the Sin of Racism

11. Sex, Biotechnology, and Biopolitics Improbable Human Nature Biotechnology and Evolution Rearguard Actions Against Biotechnology What the Future May Have in Store

Guillaume Faye was one of the principal members of the famed French New Right organisation GRECE in the 1970s and '80s. After departing in 1986 due to his disagreement with its strategy, he had a successful career on French television and radio before returning to the stage of political philosophy as a powerful alternative voice with the publication of Archeofuturism. Since then he has continued to challenge the status quo within the Right in his writings, earning him both the admiration and disdain of his colleagues. Arktos has also published English translations of his books Archeofuturism (2010), Why We Fight (2011), and The Convergence of Catastrophes (2012).

lundi, 23 juin 2014

Game is the male revolt against the sexual caste system imposed by feminism. The “red pill” is simply an acknowledgement that what women say they want, and what they actually want, are two different things. Even some women who say that they want a “traditional” relationship are not willing to do what it takes to get this by actually behaving like a lady, staying in shape, or not detonating a relationship over trivia. By definition, game is men learning what actually works with women[2] and using it to fulfill their primal needs for sex, companionship, and, ultimately, fulfilling relationships and family life.

When a member of the Parasitic Class like an affirmative action journalist or Women’s Studies professor gives his or her opinion on something, it behooves the reader to ask himself, “How does this person benefit if I believe what they are telling me?” The feminist rage against game is the rage of the effete fop against his uppity peasants. Game shifts the frame on sexual politics by allowing men to reclaim sexual power, punish female misbehavior, and pursue their own interests. It is aspirational, teaching people to look above their station, and in that sense, it is a destabilizing force within the social system. It teaches men to break free of their assigned place as the kulaks in the modern social order, responsible for subsidizing everyone else.

Notably, while “men’s sites” like Return of Kings focus on self-improvement, learning skills, and physical fitness, recent feminist writing has focused on justifying or even promoting moral flaws such as obesity, adultery, and fraud. The manosphere promotes excellence; feminism promotes equality. The default feminist rhetoric on sexual politics seems to be an inexhaustible series of variations on the theme of “Wow, just wow.” It’s not surprisingly that in such an intellectual desert even somewhat juvenile articles on “text message game” seem like an oasis.

Moreover “game” fits into the subset of Dissident Right movements that recognize there is no contradiction between Traditionalism and science. “Game” heaps scorn on the “pedestaling” behavior[3] of many religious conservatives and reactionaries who want to treat women like medieval princesses. Instead, game recognizes that women are sexually voracious in their own way, that they derive much of their self and societal value from their sexuality, and that many of the conservative beliefs about chivalry and virtuous women only make sense in a social context that privileges patriarchy, families, and fidelity. If there is one Christian teaching I can agree with, it is the doctrine of “total depravity” for both men and women.

It’s not that “science” is an enemy of Tradition – it’s that certain small “t” traditions arose because human beings act with an evolutionary program running in the background. The impulses of sexual selection, competition, and attraction are rooted deep within the unconscious of the species. So called “social constructs,” like prizing female virginity, or the willingness of men to sacrifice for women, are rooted in biological and empirical realities, not religious mysticism.

What defines the real modern Right, as opposed to the reactionaries, is understanding that objective realities are reflected within ancient mythologies and practices. The traditionalist teachings of thousands of years ago are more applicable to modern society than a PhD’s eminently credentialed and empirically flawed ramblings on Jezebel. We should be cautious about modern intellectuals casually dismissing the wisdom of millennia as “outdated” when these same people will mock religious beliefs while holding far more absurd (and less empirically supported) beliefs about racial equality.

Class Struggle

Heterosexual men are, as a class, a designated oppressor group in the system that is developing. By teaching men to question their place in this order, and leading them to more subversive conclusions about tradition, human biodiversity, and racial realism, the “manosphere” is declaring itself an enemy of the system.

But this isn’t just an ideological challenge. The personal is political and nowhere is the new hierarchy being enforced with more fanaticism than in sexual politics. Of course, the corollary is that every challenge, no matter how small, takes on new importance. In every nightclub, bar, and coffee shop, a man approaching a woman using game has been elevated to a political act. Men recognizing a desire and acting on it using knowledge about social dynamics is a challenge to the sexual serfdom that demands men they accept their place — under women. And that can lead to further rebellion.

Of course, unless it leads to other things, “game” is merely a means, not an end. And while “game” is based on highly subversive and inegalitarian premises, the ends are hardly revolutionary. After all, meaningless hook ups between immature boy-men and proud “sluts” is hardly a challenge to the consumerist culture. The value of game is that it even though it is directed towards profane ends, it can be the first step on an upward path of rebellious ascension.

Know Your Place

A telling example of the Left’s attitude towards game is the reaction of one Chris Gethard, a functionary for the Culture of Critique. He posted[4] a video telling men to avoid these ideas and was praised for it by Lindy West of the female affirmative action outlet Jezebel. Gethard flaps his weak hands and insists that men who practice game “should be legally bound [to] never find love.” But more importantly, he tells men to accept that they need to shut up and do what they are told by the media. After all, “One day you’ll be, like, 37, and you’ll have a mortgage, and you’ll be totally okay with that. You’ll be completely fine.”

Needless to say, one look at his face and you know every opinion he’s ever had and why none of them are worth listening to. As for “Lindy West,” her mere physical appearance (trigger warning[5]) warrants the return of the patriarchy, the immediate overthrow of the American government, and an Axis Victory in the Second World War, among other things.

What is important is the revelation of the end game of feminism and progressivism – don’t protest, accept your fate, and be happy you have your big screen TV that you bought with your credit card. Far from being a movement of liberation, progressivism is the handmaiden of consumerism. Don’t question these beliefs, swallow the pretty lies and we’ll let you play your video games. Know your place.

It’s more than an ideology — egalitarianism is a system of control. What the Dark Enlightenment terms the Cathedral imposes a set hierarchy of groups, along with codes of behavior. And while the punishment from deviating from codes of behavior isn’t quite as severe as what samurai meted out to impudent peasants, the principle is the same. All the sophomoric arguments, expletive-filled feminist ranting, social network shaming, and insufferably self-congratulatory #hashtags are simply the enforcement arm of this social structure.

The Bridge

For all the “metapolitics,” all the essays, all the conferences, and all the books and speeches, the White Right has only succeeded in creating a subculture, and a fairly closed one at that. No one casually enters white advocacy. The costs can be great and so are the rewards, but once you are in, you don’t go back (unless you turn traitor[6]). What it has largely failed to do is build a “bridge” to ordinary white people, who have largely been intimidated from participating in street demonstrations, attending conferences, or even speaking publicly about their beliefs.

Game, in contrast, has succeeded as a bridge to subversive ideas. While some men can tell themselves they don’t need white identity, every straight man needs to appeal to women, and not every man knows how. Game meets an existential need. More importantly, game meets the two essential characteristics of the real Right. It is rooted in empirical reality and scientific truth while still respecting Tradition, and it challenges the official orthodoxy about egalitarianism.

It’s no accident that the Southern Poverty Law Center attacked the “manosphere” as a “hate,” leading to widespread mockery. More importantly, after this occurred, many of the most important manosphere sites and commentators have been speaking frankly about racial realist concepts and ideas. Discussions on forums within this subculture are well-informed and more grounded and less ideological than the raging abstract arguments that plague White Nationalist websites. The process of radicalization (or, more accurately and charitably, waking up) is taking place amongst a huge segment of the population that this movement has never been able to reach. And regardless of what White Nationalists think about “game,” the System perceives game as a threat.

Endgame and Revolution

Why does this absurd system exist, something so paranoid that it panics over shy men trying to learn pickup lines? The same reason most things exist – someone is benefiting from it. The more deracinated society becomes and the more families are broken down, the more relationships become a simple function of the consumer economy. A hookup culture provides no barriers between the individual and the market. The fact that many Western women believe slaving away in a cubicle and participating in a garbage culture is “freedom” while raising children is “slavery” testifies to the power of social conditioning. This conditioning is part of the process of turning sex and relationships into products to be sold – or rationed out – by an increasingly totalitarian system of control. “Equality” is just part of the scam – in the end, this system is based, like any other, on the reality of power.

The solution to sexual serfdom is not revolution from the periphery, but rebellion from the center. Ride the tiger. Recognizing equality as a scam is the first step. No one believes in equality – especially in the bedroom. Act accordingly. If people are insistent on turning themselves and their bodies into a product, treat them that away, take advantage of it, and use what works. We must approach the world not as serfs, but as barbarians[7]. We have no stake in what they have built except to take what is ours. What should fill you is not a sense of entitlement, but aggressive contempt, and a desire to conquer.

Both men and women can use what the manosphere preaches. Equality is a scam – always be seeking to rise. And in your upward path, find those few men – and women – among the ruins. They are still there in the wasteland, and shared contempt for egalitarianism is as strong a foundation as any. Together, as comrades, lovers, and eventually families, men and women can forge a new people and create something worth preserving. This culture and system sure as hell isn’t it.

Keeping a house where unmarried persons are allowed to have sex is prohibited.

Florida

Married couples (as well as singles) cannot engage in open “lewdness or lascivious behavior”

Georgia

The term “sadomasochistic abuse” is defined so broadly, that it could possibly be applied to a person handcuffing another in a clown suit.

All sex toys are banned.

Illinois

If you sell a reptile, you must give a written warning not to “nuzzle or kiss” them.

It’s prohibited by law to “suffer any bitch or slut” (referring to dogs) (in Minooka.)

Indiana

It is illegal for a man to be sexually aroused in public.

Iowa

Kisses may last for no more than five minutes.

Kansas

Illegal “sodomy” includes oral sex, but anal penetration with a finger is allowed under specified circumstances.

Kentucky

Dogs must not molest property or people.

Until 1975, people wearing bathing suits on any city street were required have a police escort.

Louisiana

Necrophilia is legal.

It’s illegal to use fortune-telling, astrology or palmistry to “settle lovers quarrels.” (In New Orleans.)

Massachusetts

Making noise in a public library is a crime against “chastity, morality, decency and good order.”

Michigan

A man who seduces or corrupts an unmarried woman faces five years in prison.

Low-riding pants that expose underwear are a Class B offense. But if they expose butt cleavage, they’re a Class A offense. (In Flint.)

Mississippi

It’s illegal to teach others what polygamy is.

Adultery or premarital sex results in a fine of $500 or 6 months in prison.

Montana

Prostitution is a “crime against the family.”

Nebraska

You can’t get married if you have gonorrhea

Nevada

Sale of sex toys is illegal.

New Hampshire

Lingerie must not be hung on a clothesline at the airport, unless there’s a screen concealing it. (In Kidderville.)

New Jersey

Flirting is illegal. (In Haddon Township, NJ)

New Mexico

Nudity is allowed as long as genitals and female nipples are covered.

New York

Adultery is illegal.

North Carolina

Adultery is illegal. And so is pretending to be married in order to share a hotel room.

North Dakota

It was illegal to swim naked in the Red River between 8 AM and 8 PM. (In Fargo.)

It’s against the law to fail to confine a dog or cat in heat. (In Grand Forks.)

Ohio

No person shall solicit sex from another of the same gender if it offends the second person.

Oklahoma

It is illegal for the owner of a bar to allow anyone inside to engage in “acts, or simulated acts, of sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, or any sexual acts which are otherwise prohibited by law.” So, no simulated intercourse or animal sex.

Oregon

It’s illegal to lie down in a public restroom, or for two people to share a stall meant for one.

Pennsylvania

Oral and anal sex are illegal. You cannot cohabit with an “ancestor or descendant.”

South Carolina

If a man promises to marry a woman and she sleeps with him, the marriage must take place.

South Dakota

Public erections are illegal.

Tennessee

Students may not hold hands in school.

Texas

It’s illegal to own more than six dildos.

Utah

It’s illegal to marry your first cousin before the age of 65 — or 55 if you can prove both parties are infertile.

lundi, 02 septembre 2013

D. H. Lawrence is best known to the general public as a writer of sexy books. In his own time, his treatment of sex made him notorious and caused him to run afoul of the authorities on a number of occasions. I have no desire to rehearse in detail the well-known history of Lawrence’s troubles with censorship, but for those who do not know anything of it a few details will suffice.

In September 1915 Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, one of his major works, was published by Methuen. By November it had been banned by court order, largely due to Lawrence’s brief (and, by today’s standards, extremely tame) depiction of a lesbian affair. The following year Lawrence finished what is arguably his greatest novel, Women in Love. However, owing to the notoriety of The Rainbow as well as to Women in Love’s much more frank depiction of sexuality, he could not find a publisher for the novel until 1920. Disgusted by his treatment at the hands of his fellow countrymen, Lawrence moved himself and his wife Frieda to Sicily that year, thereby beginning a long sojourn abroad that would take them to Sardinia, Ceylon, Australia, California, and New Mexico.

Lawrence was deterred neither by censorship nor by the frequent vilification he suffered at the hands of the press. In 1926, on a visit to Italy he wrote the first of three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his most sexually explicit work and, in fact, one of the most sexually explicit “serious” works of literature ever written. A small edition of the novel was brought out in Florence in 1928, and another in Paris. Various pirated editions were also printed.

Copies of the novel were seized by customs in both the United States and Great Britain, and the reviews that appeared were brutal. One English critic declared that the novel was “the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness . . . Unfortunately for literature as for himself, Mr. Lawrence has a diseased mind.”[1] (The famous court case in Britain occurred thirty years after Lawrence’s death, when Penguin Books brought out an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley.)

In 1926 Lawrence had started to paint. He wrote to his friend Earl Brewster, a Buddhist, “I put a phallus, a lingam you call it, in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won’t shock people’s castrated social spirituality.”[2] Predictably, when an exhibition of his paintings was held in London in 1929 it was raided by the police, though, as Jeffrey Meyers notes, the officers “politely waited to carry out their orders until the Aga Khan had finished viewing the pictures.”[3]

Why was Lawrence seemingly so preoccupied with sex? The answer is that he saw sex as a means to awaken the true self, and to discover not only our own inner being but the inner being of all things. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he writes, “To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a vital experience of tremendous importance.”[4]

Lawrence was unquestionably influenced by Schopenhauer in his views about the metaphysical significance of sex. In his unpublished notebooks—summing up views he expressed more circumspectly in his published writings—Schopenhauer states

If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to live, is to be found, or where that essence enters most clearly into our consciousness, or where it achieves the purest revelation of itself, then I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation. That is it! That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence.[5]

However, Lawrence (unlike Schopenhauer) saw the inner essence of things as having religious significance. He felt that the “life mystery” at the core of all was the only thing that he could honestly call God. Hence, he regarded sex as sacred—indeed as an act of divine worship—since it opens us to the life mystery. In a posthumously published essay Lawrence writes, “In the very darkest continent of the body there is God.”[6] This is the real key to understanding Lawrence’s treatment of sex: it is reverential; he regards sex as sacred, not as profane. The public attacks on Lawrence’s work as “smut” are hugely unjust, for Lawrence had a lifelong hatred of pornography precisely because he saw it as a profanation of sex.

An illustration of Lawrence’s attitude is his reaction to James Joyce’s Ulysses. As Jeffrey Meyers notes, it was, in part, Lawrence’s hostile reaction to Ulysses that spurred him to write Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In a letter Lawrence stated, “The last part of [Ulysses] is the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written. . . . This Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanova. I must show that it can be done without muck.”[7] This may seem a trifle ironic, given how others had attacked Lawrence’s own work with similar invective. But, in fact, Lawrence’s attitude to Joyce is not hypocritical. He is not attacking the explicitness of Joyce’s treatment of sex, but rather what he regarded as its unforgivable irreverence.

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “In sex we have our basic, most elemental being.”[8] Further, he declares that the procreative purpose of sex is “just a side-show.”[9] Lawrence rejects the reductive, scientific understanding of sex; part and parcel of the scientific will to nullify beauty and mystery and to make everything mundane and “practical.”

Sex can lead to reproduction, but it is no more correct to say that the “purpose” of sex is reproduction than it is to say that the purpose of eating is to fill our stomachs. More often than not, we eat not because we happen to really need nourishment just then, but because we take pleasure in eating, in the taste of food, and in the company of those we eat with. And frequently the food we enjoy ingesting has little actual nutritional value. If the purpose of eating were simply to acquire nourishment, then we ought not mind the idea of simply ingesting a tasteless paste full of vitamins, minerals, protein, and carbohydrates three times daily.

Sex, Lawrence tells us,

is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep. The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living soul: the depths.[10]

When we enter into what Schopenhauer calls “ecstasy in the act of copulation,” there is a sloughing off of intellect, of self-consciousness. The act is ecstatic precisely to the extent that this is accomplished. The Greek ekstasis could be translated literally as “standing outside oneself.” In ecstatic acts we have the sense of leaving ourselves, and certainly our consciousness of ourselves (our inner monitor, inner censor, inner doubter) behind. Insofar as we cannot accomplish this, the sexual act will be dissatisfying. The woman may experience little pleasure, and the man may even be unable to perform, should he fail to disengage the intellect.

Of course, when we are caught in the ecstasy of sex we are not literally unconscious. What happens, in effect, is that a different sort of consciousness takes over: what Lawrence calls “blood-consciousness.” What Lawrence means by this term is the pre-reflective, pre-conceptual, subterranean depth in consciousness: what he sometimes confusingly calls the “unconscious.”

Sometimes this type of consciousness is derisively labeled the “animal” in us. This is misleading, for we have a tendency not to think of ourselves as animals, and labeling the blood-consciousness “animal” becomes a way to disown it. But it is our own, and, of course, we are animals. In the heat of true, ecstatic sexual passion, one loses a sense of individuality. It is common to hear the participants speak (later on) of losing the sense of bodily boundaries, and feeling as if the two bodies merged into one. Strange, animal-like cries are uttered and motions become automatic rather than deliberately willed.

In sex we surrender our intellect and self-consciousness, and open ourselves to the blood-consciousness, to our primal self—so that we become, for the space of the act, that primal self. And this is the reason why modern people are so sex-obsessed.

To live in modern, industrialized society means to live almost constantly from what Lawrence calls the “upper centres,” from intellect. And it means to live surrounded at all times by the products of intellect, cocooned in a synthetic, human world built over top of the natural world, operating according to human ideas and ideals. Almost always, this life requires us to lead an existence that is false in certain fundamental ways; false and inimical to life and to the natural, primal self. Passionate sex, insofar as modern people can even manage it, is the only respite from this that most people know. As such, Lawrence believes that in sex we are fundamentally truer than at most other times in life. And reflection on what the sex act means may help us to recover this trueness in daily life, outside of sexual activity.

All of the above is an attempt to say “what sex is.” But Lawrence holds that ultimately it is ineffable:

We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know so much: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, and a circuit of force always flowing. . . . We know that in the act of coition the blood of the individual man, acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity—we know no word, so say “electricity,” by analogy—rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge towards the blood of the female. The whole of the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible, clash into a oneness.[11]

Lawrence’s remark about his use of the term “electricity” tells us that we should not take this description very literally. When he speaks of an “electricity” in the blood of a sexually aroused man or woman, he uses this term, for lack of a better one, to describe the peculiar sense of acute, tingling “aliveness” that one feels in sexual ecstasy. When he speaks of a “magnetic attraction” between the blood of man and woman, he means the uncanny, overpowering, and unchosen sense of attraction that one experiences for the other. It is a sense of attraction that at times makes men and women feel that they must come together or die.

We attempt to deflate the mystery of this attraction by chalking it up to “chemistry.” Indeed it may somehow be chemical, but to describe the physical conditions necessary for a profound experience to take place does not render it less profound, or less mysterious. It might seem a bit ironic, given Lawrence’s criticisms of science, that his own language has a kind of scientific veneer, with its talk of “electricity,” “magnetism,” and “polarity.” But Lawrence’s “science” is, in fact, a throwback to the vitalistic philosophy of nature of the Romantics.

Lawrence attempts to sum things up as follows: “Sex then is a polarization of the individual blood in man towards the individual blood in woman.”[12] At the root of this idea is a basic conviction of Lawrence’s, which cannot be overemphasized: that men and women are fundamentally and radically different—metaphysically different. (See my essay “D. H. Lawrence on Men and Women[2].”) In the same text he writes, “We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes.”

Lawrence wrote this in 1921 intending it to be provocative, but it is surely much more controversial in today’s world, where it has become a dogma in some circles to insist that sex differences (now called “gender differences”) are “socially constructed,” and that the only natural differences between the sexes are purely and simply anatomical. Lawrence continues: “There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse, men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.”[13]

Interestingly, I believe that Lawrence derives the idea of “cells” being male or female from Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, a text he was definitely familiar with. Weininger writes: “every cell of the organism . . . has a sexual character.” And: “In a male every part, even the smallest, is male, however much it may resemble the corresponding part of a female, and in the latter, likewise, even the smallest part is exclusively female.”[14]

Setting Weininger aside, this is Lawence’s way of emphasizing that men and women are different all the way down, and that there are ways in which they can never understand each other, and never see as the other sees. Lawrence is concerned in particular (though this is not obvious) to guard against the claim that there are borderline cases of men and women who are (psychically) androgynous, straddling the divide between male and female:

A child is born sexed. A child is either male or female; in the whole of its psyche and physique is either male or female. Every single living cell is either male or female, and will remain either male or female as long as life lasts. And every single cell in every male child is male, and every cell in every female is female. The talk about a third sex, or about the indeterminate sex, is just to pervert the issue.[15]

The reference in the last sentence is to the ideas of figures like Magnus Hirschfeld and, indeed, Otto Weininger, both of whom argued that homosexuals were sexually “intermediate.” Part of the reason Lawrence is so vehement in this passage is that he had strong homosexual inclinations (as any honest reader of Women in Love, especially its deleted “Prologue,” will admit). Early in life he saw himself as an androgynous being, with a hefty share of femininity in his soul. However, he came to repudiate this idea and to regard it as having hindered his development as a man.

The Phallus

In coition, Lawrence writes, “the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible, clash into a oneness.”[16] The means by which this connection occurs, where the blood of the man and the woman is brought together, is the phallus. One of Lawrence’s most important philosophical essays is “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’” which he wrote partly to answer criticisms of the novel, and partly to make explicit and expound upon the novel’s message. He writes at one point that “The phallus is a column of blood that fills the valley of blood of a woman. The great river of male blood touches to its depths the great river of female blood—yet neither breaks its bounds.” The two blood streams, the male and the female, “encircle the whole of life.”[17] They never literally mingle, but coition is essentially an act in which the blood of the male, enfolded within an extension of his flesh, enters the blood-engorged flesh of the woman—and the two blood streams come as close to mingling as they ever will.

The result is a crisis; an ecstatic moment in which—as in the Zen experience of satori—there is the sudden, non-verbal intuition that this here now is all there is, and there is a loss of the sense of individual separateness and isolation; a sense of becoming absorbed into a greater unity. Lawrence describes the orgasm as follows: “There is a lightning flash which passes through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each—and then the tension passes.”[18]

In his later works, Lawrence writes often and explicitly of the metaphysical, indeed the divine significance of the phallus. For example, in the second of Lawrence’s three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (published posthumously as John Thomas and Lady Jane) there is a scene in which Constance Chatterley lies beside her sleeping lover, contemplating his flaccid penis. “Wasn’t there a weird, grotesque godhead in it?” she asks herself, and what follows is a passage of great significance:

To most men, the penis was merely a member, at the disposal of the personality. Most men merely used their penis as they use their fingers, for some personal purpose of their own. But in a true man, the penis has a life of its own, and is the second man within the man. It is prior to the personality. And the personality must yield before the priority and the mysterious root-knowledge of the penis, or the phallus. For this is the difference between the two: the penis is a mere member of the physiological body. But the phallus, in the old sense, has roots, the deepest roots of all, in the soul and the greater consciousness of man, and it is through the phallic roots that inspiration enters the soul.[19]

Lawrence makes a traditional distinction in this passage (though, as usual, he is slip-shod about it) between the penis and the phallus, which is the erect penis. In cultures that have worshipped the penis, it always the erect penis that is depicted and revered. Why? Because, in a real sense, the phallus does not belong to the individual man. It is—notoriously—not under the control of his personality, his mental self-conscious being. It has a will of its own. It is the “second man within the man,” meaning that it is a direct expression or, if you will, externalization of the deeper, truer, self; of the unconscious, or blood-consciousness.

This self is “prior to the personality,” and indeed it is fundamentally the same in all men. So it transcends the individual—indeed it is an expression of the life mystery which permeates all of nature. The penis, Lawrence tells us, is a “mere member of the physiological body,” but the phallus is something that rises from out of the chthonic depth of nature itself. The phallus is our connection to those depths. When Lawrence says that it is “through the phallic roots that inspiration enters the soul” he means that it is insofar as we are able to surrender our intellect and mental awareness that we are guided by the wisdom of the blood-consciousness.

If a man’s mental self dominates him and grips him, refusing to let go, preoccupying him with thoughts, then he cannot achieve an erection. His mind has “blocked” the primal, unconscious self. This is all that the mind can do to the primal self—it cannot command it. Hence there is no “willing” an erection. But if a man can momentarily surrender his mental self, then the blood-consciousness is awakened, and the phallus comes to life. The virile man is admired because he has a connection to the primal force. The impotent man is pathetic in our eyes, because he has lost that connection. He is literally without power.

Thus, for Lawrence, sexual arousal in the male and the sex act following upon it become emblematic of what must take place if there is to be a general return to the blood-consciousness, and thus an achievement of lasting happiness, lasting satisfaction in the whole of life. There must be a surrender of idealism, and of the tendency to live strictly from the “upper centres.” There is no way to get to the natural self by way of intellect and its ideas, just as there is no willing an erection. All that mind can do is to let go—to do nothing. Then the blood-consciousness takes over and the result is that there rises up from the root of us a new man, a new self. New only in the sense that it is unfamiliar to us, for in truth it is actually the oldest of old selves.

Erection and a full, ecstatic sexual experience symbolize for Lawrence the successful reawakening of the primal self that is needed if we are to again become natural creatures and achieve our “fullness of being.” But they are not merely symbolic. Lawrence also sees coition as the deepest, most profound, and profoundly mysterious way in which we come into contact with our chthonic depth, and the chthonic depth of the natural world itself. Hence, in “A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’” he says the following

[The] phallus is the connecting link between the two rivers [of male and female blood], that establishes the two streams in a oneness, and gives out of their duality a single circuit, forever. And this, this oneness gradually accomplished throughout a life-time in twoness, is the highest achievement of time or eternity. From it all things human spring, children and beauty and well-made things; all the true creations of humanity. And all we know of the will of God is that He wishes this, this oneness, to take place, fulfilled over a lifetime, this oneness within the great dual blood-stream of humanity.[20]

Here Lawrence makes it quite clear, as he does in innumerable other places, that his reverence for the phallus is a religious one. Indeed, it would not be a distortion to call his own, personal religion a form of “phallic worship.” This is, of course, a provocative choice of words, but not an inaccurate one. There is, in fact, a remarkable similarity between Lawrence’s views and Hindu Shaivism, the oldest surviving phallic cult in the world.

The God Shiva is a personification of what Lawrence means by the life mystery or “pan power,” as well as what Schopenhauer meant by the will in nature.[21] Alain Daniélou, one of the foremost Western interpreters of Shaivism, writes

As Lord of Yoga, Shiva is named Yogendra, Yogeshvara, Mahâyogi, since it is he who taught the world the Yoga method through which man can know himself, realize himself and communicate with subtle beings, beasts, plants and gods. He also teaches the dance and the music which leads to ecstasy, the intoxication which takes man out of himself. . . . His festivals are those of Spring, of the Renewal of Life, and of creative Eroticism. . . . He is naked, libidinous, and preaches rapture, love, detachment, and friendship with nature. God of Sensual Pleasure and of Death, he is present in the forest and the funeral pyre. Shiva is at the same time benevolent (Shambhu) and terrible (Bhîma).[22]

Although these and many other qualities are attributed to Shiva, the sacred Shaivite texts indicate that the true Shiva is beyond all human categories: “Shiva (the supreme divinity) is without sign (without sex), without color, without taste, without odor, beyond the reach of words or touch, without qualities, immutable and immobile.”[23] This being can therefore only be known through some tangible sign that it gives of itself in the physical, perceptible universe, and that sign is the phallus.

The Sanskrit word for phallus, lingam, literally means “sign.” Daniélou writes, “The lingam, or phallus, the source of life, is the form by which the Absolute Being, from whom the world is issued, can be evoked. . . . In the microcosm, which is to say in man, the sexual organ, the source of life, is the form in which the nature of the formless manifests itself.”[24]

Daniélou quotes liberally from ancient texts in order to explain the Shaivite attitude toward the phallus and its relationship to Shiva. One such text states, “Shiva said ‘I am not distinct from the phallus. The phallus is identical with me, and therefore must be worshipped. My well-beloved! Wherever there is an upright male organ, I myself am present, even if there is no other representation of me.”[25] This passage indicates that the phallus is not, in fact, merely a symbol of Shiva, but is a physical “expression” of the god—the most perfect expression of the god, in fact. In a way, Shiva is distinct from the phallus, but in a way the phallus is Shiva.

We find just the same sort of mystical logic in Lawrence: the phallus is an expression of the life mystery, as the blood-consciousness that animates it is an expression of the life mystery; but the phallus, and blood-consciousness just are the life mystery, as it expresses itself in us. The phallus is our link to the life force itself. Daniélou writes, “The penis is therefore the organ through which a link is established between man . . . and the creative force which is the nature of the divine.”[26] Lawrence expresses precisely this Shaivite conception in John Thomas and Lady Jane, when Constance Chatterley has an argument with her very modern and irreligious sister:

“I don’t care!” she said stubbornly to Hilda at bedtime. “I know the penis is the most godly part of a man. . . . I know it is the penis which connects us with the stars and the sea and everything. It is the penis which touches the planets, and makes us feel their special light. I know it. I know it was the penis which really put the evening stars into my inside self. I used to look at the evening star, and think how lovely and wonderful it was. But now it’s in me as well as outside me, and I need hardly look at it. I am it. I don’t care what you say, it was the penis gave it me.”[27]

According to Daniélou, Shaivism regards the procreative purpose of sex as “a side show” – just as Lawrence does. Daniélou writes that the phallus has a dual role: “the inferior one of procreation and the superior one of contacting the divine state by means of the ecstasy caused by pleasure (ànanda). The orgasm is a ‘divine sensation.’ So whereas paternity attaches man to the things of the earth, the ecstasy of pleasure can reveal divine reality to him, leading him to detachment and spiritual realization.”[28]

The orgasm, for Lawrence as well as for Shaivism, is a religious experience in which selfhood is transcended and we become reabsorbed, momentarily, into the life mystery; connected to “the stars and the sea and everything.” Daniélou quotes another Shaivite text: “Every orgasm, every pleasure is a divine experience. The entire universe springs forth from enjoyment. Pleasure is at the origin of all that exists.”[29]

Just as Lawrence’s ideas about the metaphysical significance of the phallus and intercourse can be likened to Shaivism, his views about the use of sex as a means to “awakening” can be likened to Tantra. Tantra refers to the set of practical techniques and methods used to bring the individual to union with the divine source.

In the West, we tend to associate Tantra exclusively with a kind of “sex magic,” and although there are other forms of Tantra this is, in fact, the one that I am drawing on in making comparisons to Lawrence. Tantric sex actually involves a rather overwhelmingly complex collection of ritual preparations, mantras, and physical positions. None of these are truly relevant to our concerns here. Suffice it to say that the theory behind Tantric sex involves the belief that if intercourse is approached properly, with an understanding of the metaphysical significance of the act, it affords the participants the opportunity to achieve a state of transcendence.

They lose their sense of individuality and merge with each other, and through merging with each other—through bringing together the male and female natures—they participate in the creative power represented by Shiva. Again, the parallels to Lawrence are obvious. He too regarded the man and the woman as representing eternal male and female powers, and he saw in intercourse a way in which the two become one (“the highest achievement of time or eternity”) and in so doing, lose themselves in the life mystery.

lundi, 17 juin 2013

The “Gender Industry” — Controlling the Periphery

More than contributing to just and humane societies, the international gender industry, feminism’s institutionalized offshoot, has undeniably become part of multi-faceted attempts at periphery control.

Just like threats and enemies often don’t turn out to be who we are told or believe them to be, measures and movements with an apparently noble and humanist purpose do not always serve it. Draconic laws against “hate speech” and “extremism,” for instance, are perhaps not as much about promoting tolerance or stopping evil white supremacists and evil Salafists as the public is told. The latter groups rather serve as mediagenic scarecrows, the threat of which serves to legitimize a set of laws, policies and control organs that are set up for the purpose of intimidating or silencing all forms of effective dissent against the neoliberal order in the future. Likewise, tightened gun-control laws are not in place for the protection of ordinary citizens, but rather represent attempts by the power elites to curb the circulation of firearms that could, one day, be turned against them as the cropped-up frustration, bitterness and despair that ferment at the grassroots level, explode.

Orwellian doublethink and newspeak have never been as lavishly used as under the neoliberal hegemony that arose after the demise of the Cold War and the bipolar world order. Now, the same paradox applies to feminism and its more comprehensive and slick spin-off and alibi, gender. Much can be traced back to so-called “second-wave feminism,” a movement that originated among upper-middle class and elite women in northwestern Europe and in the US between 1965-75. Its major aims were the financial independence for women through their full integration into the labor market, and the so-called “sexual liberation.” There is no doubt that the movement initially addressed real inequalities, abuses and hypocrisies. Yet, it lost part of its moral superiority once it became an instrument of ingraining a neoliberal world order – a dehumanizing system in which all aspects of life have to become marketable, with everyone and everything as merchandise, subordinate to oligarchic and cosmopolitan financial elites — in the deepest fabric of society. How did this happen?

Is Freedom Slavery?

Let us look at its actual legacy in the countries' societies where it started: that is the OECD sphere, and northwestern Europe and the US in particular. If one makes abstraction of the rhetoric about emancipation, progress, equal opportunity and freedom of choice, which have been truly or allegedly obtained, one sees that over the last decades men and women in the OECD sphere’s core societies have reached almost complete equality — that is, in the first place, as consumers and taxable subjects. It’s important to emphasize this; for the upgrading of women to fully-fledged laborers, consumers and taxpayers was the actual purpose of the establishment’s recuperation of feminism, or at least a number of its issues. In terms of marketization of society, the so-called sexual liberation also came into practice as the full incorporation of the sexual mores of the left-libertarian protest subcultures from the 1965-75 period, into marketing and mass consumerism. But perhaps the most important is this: the steered vilification and destruction of the core family and the clan as the cornerstones of a natural societal order, and the power struggle and hostility between the sexes that is being constantly incited by lifestyle magazines, reality TV, women’s organizations, social workers and lawyers, has proven to be an ultimate divide-and-rule tactic.

Perhaps it's somewhat bluntly put. But let’s stick to the essentials. The fragmentation and mutation of the social fabric also came to serve a major purpose of ensuring ideological continuity, in the sense that corporate media, subsidized pedagogues and all sorts of therapists became major players in the education and acculturation of children and young adults instead of the family. At a loss because of the breakup of the family structure and degradation of the father figure, they become much easier to indoctrinate with the systemic values and norms through the said channels. Finally, in terms of society control, the promotion of feminization and metro-sexuality among boys and men through media and commercials is to dilute the physical and psychological capacity for effective rebellion and revolution against the order of things. The oligarchy has understood all too well that the physical input on the streets during turmoil and revolutions have always primarily been carried out by men.

So, one starts to wonder whether it’s really about creating a more soft and gentle society, or, rather, a submissive one that lives an illusion of freedom and equality. More recently, the gender sector went further with the promotion of gay rights, which after a while have become rights of “sexual minorities” in international policy discourse. On the whole it looks like in some way, feminism and the gender sector eventually came to serve the oppression that they pretend to fight. Is it this that the thousands of well-intended feminists and gender activists wanted? Most probably not. The thing is, that their movements, and real and perceived achievements, were recuperated by a system, the nature of which they failed to understand — at least in time. But on the other hand, feminism’s recuperation into a tool for the neoliberal oligarchy was only possible because part of the feminist elites understood that they could make careers on this, especially once the baby boomers and soixante-huitards, who propagated second-wave feminism, found their way into the upper echelons of national politics and international institutions.

The Wrath of the Peripheries

For sober minds, it had been clear for a long time now that resistance against, and alternatives to, neo-liberalism would not come from the secular Lefts. As Oswald Spengler rightly said at the time – and as the former Socialist sphere in the 1990s as well as the devolution of European social-democrats illustrate – every “outbreak” of Socialism creates new paths for capitalism. Neither can much be expected from established democratic structures and actors, because these have been largely reduced to entertainment and periodic political rituals that do not affect the real powers that be. Instead, the resistance and alternatives come and will continue to come from the internal and global peripheries and from emerging powers. They will be grafted in existing or re-composed solidarity groups, existing or born-again forms of traditionalism, and religion. Depending on the society and the geographic sphere, the latter particularly includes Islam, Christianity, and perhaps neo-paganism.

Even within the OECD sphere itself, remnants of traditional structures and religion might one day prove vital for the survival of individuals and for the recomposing of societies once the current order implodes, as it sooner or later will. Therefore, these have to be discredited and discarded so that no alternatives can form, or that they can be marginalized where they exist. What the protagonists and agents of global neoliberal hegemony especially fear is that emerging powers and traditionalist and non-secular resistance movements will somehow find a common cause. Furthermore, similar to what took place in the OECD sphere, the global consumers’ base has to be expanded so that the economic system can extend its survival. This means that collective identities, norms and values that form an impediment to the transformation of the peripheries’ societies into fully-fledged consumer bases, have to be dealt with. And this is where the gender industry, amongst others, comes in. So, what it essentially comes to, is that the process of social fragmentation of feminism’s original turf has to be propagated and grafted in the internal periphery – that is, the non-Western and in particular Muslim immigrants in the OECD sphere – as well as in the global periphery and, here again, with particular attention to its Islamic sectors. This also includes the exportation of the sexual minorities agenda.

A major channel of what is definitely becoming gender imperialism is international development aid. The use of aid to transform peripheral societies and gain some control over them in the process has been conceptualized by authors like Mark Duffield, amongst others. The following figure offers a concrete look at what aid for the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment as a principal or significant goal, represent in the overall aid volume from the OECD sphere, and how it evolved over time. These figures only reflect reported official aid. If one adds the activities where gender equality is an implicit and not a major goal, as well as the contributions from private donors, the portion of such aid is likely to be higher. Nonetheless, if we look at the timeline, we see that aid related to gender systematically increased after 1999, and especially from 2002 onwards. This is no coincidence. For a start, gender equality was streamlined and integrated as a priority development goal at a number of global summits under UN aegis between 1995 and 2000. More importantly, there was the shifting geopolitical paradigm. Earlier, the “opening” of the former Socialist societies in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Eurasia had already created a real or hoped-for space for “social reconstruction” along neoliberal lines. The rapid impoverishment and the social and moral dislocation that these societies went through in the early 1990s created opportunities for the international gender industry too. Officially there to save women from degradation and exploitation, its task, in fact, was to help prevent any return or rehabilitation of traditionalist and non-secular alternatives to defunct Socialism.

Aid as “Social Software”

Things gained momentum, however, with the official start of what we know as the “Global War on Terror” in late 2001 and early 2002. Of course, this multi-dimensional war did not start out of the blue. It was rather the outcome of an older security focus shift towards the Islamic sphere that was already clear during the First Gulf War in 1990-91 — the one following Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. After the overt start of the current phase of the war on terror in 2001-02, however, one observes a strong and systematic increase of gender aid. So now, on average, we are talking about $17.6 billion of official gender aid per annum since 2002. Contrary to what some may think, the bulk of this, about three quarters in the 2008-11 period for instance, did not come from the US but from EU institutions — especially from the major EU member states. This suggests some sort of task division in which the US provides the bulk of the military muscle for neo-imperial intervention, while the more effeminate EU brings the social software to transform societies. Country-wise, much of the gender-related aid, both proportional or in absolute terms, is destined for, hardly surprising, majority Muslim societies that are the frontlines in the war on terror (flagship context being of course Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and, more recently, Mali and Indonesia).

There’s also India and China, and a number of African countries that are categorized as fragile states or where assertive Christian movements exist. Interestingly, the top recipients also include Vietnam, a nominally socialist country and onetime anti-imperialist bulwark, but that has now apparently become a champion of sexual minority rights. It is, of course, wrong to look at the whole gender industry as a centralized, uniform sector bound by global sisterhood and solidarity. It is rather a realm of numerous specialized international institutions, international as well as local non-governmental organizations, consulting firms, platforms and egos that are permanently in competition with each other for a piece of the donor funding pie, career opportunities and their own continuity, and in which “oppressed women” eventually serve as a backdrop. This competition and divisions, which is one of the reasons why the sector will eventually fail in its objectives, will most likely increase when funding shrinks if the economic crisis in the OECD sphere lasts or worsens. In the field, however, common traits and ways of operating can be observed. First, the whole effort is largely elite-driven. Just like the West-African slave trade and early European colonialism in India, for instance, could never have been organized without the active and interested support of native notability and merchant princes, neo-liberal hegemony, and the gender industry that has to help anchor it in the social fabric, have to rely on local elite groups and, of course, their interests.

These elite groups form much of the gender industry’s local staff and the leadership of local women’s movements. Being composed of members of more cosmopolitan, westernized segments of society, secularists, yuppies, artistic milieus and more opportunistic officials, they understand very well the profitability of acting as subcontractors in donor agendas. Most often, however, they do not reflect what lives and moves in wider society, which they often fear and despise for its perceived “backwardness.” The twisted and socially prejudiced assessment of the gender situation that this often brings, reflects a deep social divide between the elites, the grassroots and the socially mobile. What was striking to me, for example, during the whole outrage around the Delhi rape case earlier this year, when elite feminists – of the kind that treat their domestic servants like rubbish after coming home from the umpteenth human rights seminar – skipped no opportunity to blame “the backward traditionalism of the masses” for the increase in rape cases. Typically, hardly anyone in those circles even suggested that the rapid spread of the liberal virtue of pornography could, maybe, be a far more important cause.

Stop Pretending

Second, one can observe a clear tendency of focusing on extreme, if not marginal, situations and incidents of which women fall victim, in order to almost demonize, in cooperation with system pundits craving for sensation, the male and traditionalist sections of society — if not entire countries. Of course, with some martyr babes and a tearjerker or two thrown in, it gives the international visibility and legitimacy that is needed for funding. But, more essentially, it feeds a latent narrative in which men are uniformly depicted as oppressive, violent, lazy and irresponsible. And this has to serve, indeed, the same divide-and-rule tactic, which is to set the sexes up against each other. In reality, however, between the elite feminists and the libertine jet set women on one hand, and the women who are victim of spectacular, brutal abuses on the other, there exists a wide and diverse societal middle ground in which men and women, as good and as bad as it gets for everyone, do have a mature modus vivendi in a daily environment that is defined both by tradition and globalization. But hardly anyone seems interested in this. For one, there’s much less spectacular misery to see and sell.

But the existence of this silent, yet living, majority underlines something much more important. Just like the left-wing students with upper-middle class backgrounds in the Western Europe of 1965-75 — who went to the factories to spread the gospel of proletarian revolution and encountered indifference, if not outright hostility, from the very workers that they wanted to “emancipate” — privileged feminists and gender professionals are as baffled when they finally realize that the bulk of, say, Arab, Afghan and African women that they want to “save” and “enlighten” are maybe all but waiting for that. And that is at once the other reason why the gender strategy could eventually fail.

Before anyone thinks this is outrageous or preposterous, lay assured that I understand such criticisms. There used to be a time, quite some years ago already, that yours truly bought into all this as well: after all, who could be against protecting and liberating women from abuse, exploitation and discrimination? The thing is, when you work in different spheres and societies long enough and when you have eyes and ears, you realize at a certain moment that one has to be either malevolent or a stubborn idealist not to grasp that the beautiful discourse and slick slogans do not entirely reflect reality. And that reality is when one comes to see where the roads paved with good intentions can at times lead to.

mercredi, 26 septembre 2012

Keith Preston:

Beyond Prudery and Perversion: The Sexual Aesthetics and Metaphysics of Julius Evola

Of the various manifestations of the egalitarian cultural revolution that has transpired in the Western world over the past half century, none have been quite so enduring or become so deeply rooted in the culture of modern society as the so-called “sexual revolution.” Indeed, it might well be argued that even the supposed commitment of Western cultural elites in the early twenty-first century to the ethos of racial egalitarianism is not quite as profound as their commitment to the preservation and expansion of the victories of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution itself brings with it many of its own manifestations. These include the now prevailing feminist ethos, the liberalization of both popular opinion and public legislation concerning sexual conduct, abortion and contraception, divorce, the normalization of homosexuality accompanied by the growth of powerful homosexual political interest groups, and the identification of an ever-growing list of “gender identity” or “sexual orientation” groups who are subsequently assigned their position in the Left’s pantheon of the oppressed.

Of course, the ongoing institutionalization of the values of the sexual revolution is not without its fierce critics. Predictably, the most strident criticism of sexual liberalism originates from the clerical and political representatives of the institutions of organized Christianity and from concerned Christian laypeople. Public battles over sexual issues are depicted in the establishment media as conflicts between progressive-minded, intelligent and educated liberals versus ignorant, bigoted, sex-phobic reactionaries. Dissident conservative media outlets portray conflicts of this type as pitting hedonistic, amoral sexual libertines against beleaguered upholders of the values of faith, family, and chastity. Yet this “culture war” between liberal libertines and Christian puritans is not what should be the greatest concern of those holding a radical traditionalist or conservative revolutionary outlook.

Sexuality and the Pagan Heritage of Western Civilization

The European New Right has emerged as the most intellectually progressive and sophisticated contemporary manifestation of the values of the conservative revolution. Likewise, the overlapping schools of thought associated with the ENR have offered the most penetrating and comprehensive critique of the domination of contemporary cultural and political life by the values of liberalism and the consequences of this for Western civilization. The ENR departs sharply from conventional “conservative” criticisms of liberalism of the kind that stem from Christian piety. Unlike the Christian conservatives, the European New Right does not hesitate to embrace the primordial pagan heritage of the Indo-European ancestors of Western peoples. The history of the West is much older than the fifteen hundred year reign of the Christian church that characterized Western civilization from the late Roman era to the early modern period. This history includes foremost of all the classical Greco-Roman civilization of antiquity and its legacy of classical pagan scholarship and cultural life. Recognition of this legacy includes a willingness to recognize and explore classical pagan attitudes towards sexuality. As Mark Wegierski has written:

The ENR’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality…ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations. However, while relatively more tolerant in principle, they still value strong family life, fecundity, and marriage or relations within one’s own ethnic group. (Their objection to intraethnic liaisons would be that the mixture of ethnic groups diminishes a sense of identity. In a world where every marriage was mixed, cultural identity would disappear). They also criticize Anglo-American moralism and its apparent hypocrisy: ” . . . In this, they are closer to a worldly Europe than to a puritanical America obsessed with violence. According to the ENR: “Our ancestral Indo-European culture . . . seems to have enjoyed a healthy natural attitude to processes and parts of the body concerned with the bringing forth of new life, the celebration of pair-bonding love, and the perpetuation of the race.”

In its desire to create a balanced psychology of sexual relations, the ENR seeks to overcome the liabilities of conventional conservative thought: the perception of conservatives as joyless prudes, and the seemingly ridiculous psychology implied in conventional Christianity. It seeks to address “flesh-and-blood men and women,” not saints. Since some of the Left’s greatest gains in the last few decades have been made as a result of their championing sexual freedom and liberation, the ENR seeks to offer its own counter-ethic of sexual joy. The hope is presumably to nourish persons of the type who can, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “make love alter reading Hegel.” This is also related to the desire for the reconciliation of the intellectual and warrior in one person: the reconciliation of vita contemplative and vita activa.1

It is therefore the task of contemporary proponents of the values of conservative revolution to create a body of sexual ethics that offers a genuine third position beyond that of mindless liberal hedonism or the equally mindless sex-phobia of the Christian puritans. In working to cultivate such an alternative sexual ethos, the thought of Julius Evola regarding sexuality will be quite informative.

The Evolan Worldview

Julius Evola published his Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex in 1958.2This work contains a comprehensive discussion of Evola’s views of sexuality and the role of sexuality in his wider philosophical outlook. In the book, Evola provides a much greater overview of his own philosophy of sex, a philosophy which he had only alluded to in prior works such as The Yoga of Power (1949)3 and, of course, his magnum opus Revolt Against the Modern World (1934)4. Evola’s view of sexuality was very much in keeping with his wider view of history and civilization. Evola’s philosophy, which he termed merely as “Tradition,” was essentially a religion of Evola’s own making. Evola’s Tradition was a syncretic amalgam of various occult and metaphysical influences derived from ancient myths and esoteric writings. Foremost among these were the collection of myths found in various Greek and Hindu traditions having to do with a view of human civilization and culture as manifestation of a process of decline from a primordial “Golden Age.”

It is interesting to note that Evola rejected modern views of evolutionary biology such as Darwinian natural selection. Indeed, his views on the origins of mankind overlapped with those of Vedic creationists within the Hindu tradition. This particular reflection of the Vedic tradition postulates the concept of “devolution” which, at the risk of oversimplification, might be characterized as a spiritualistic inversion of modern notions of evolution. Mankind is regarded as having devolved into its present physical form from primordial spiritual beings, a view that is still maintained by some Hindu creationists in the contemporary world.5 Comparable beliefs were widespread in ancient mythology. Hindu tradition postulates four “yugas” with each successive yuga marking a period of degeneration from the era of the previous yuga. The last of these, the so-called “Kali Yuga,” represents an Age of Darkness that Evola appropriated as a metaphor for the modern world. This element of Hindu tradition parallels the mythical Golden Age of the Greeks, where the goddess of justice, Astraea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis, lived among mankind in an idyllic era of human virtue. The similarities of these myths to the legend of the Garden of Eden in the Abrahamic traditions where human beings lived in paradise prior the Fall are also obvious enough.

It would be easy enough for the twenty-first century mind to dismiss Evola’s thought in this regard as a mere pretentious appeal to irrationality, mysticism, superstition or obscurantism. Yet to do so would be to ignore the way in which Evola’s worldview represents a near-perfect spiritual metaphor for the essence of the thought of the man who was arguably the most radical and far-sighted thinker of modernity: Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, it is not implausible to interpret Evola’s work as an effort to place the Nietzschean worldview within a wider cultural-historical and metaphysical framework that seeks to provide a kind of reconciliation with the essential features of the world’s great religious traditions which have their roots in the early beginnings of human consciousness. Nietzsche, himself a radical materialist, likewise regarded the history of Western civilization as involving a process of degeneration from the high point of the pre-Socratic era. Both Nietzsche and Evola regarded modernity as the lowest yet achieved form of degenerative decadence with regards to expressions of human culture and civilization. The Nietzschean hope for the emergence of anubermenschen that has overcome the crisis of nihilism inspired by modern civilization and the Evolan hope for a revival of primordial Tradition as an antidote to the perceived darkness of the current age each represent quite similar impulses within human thought.

The Metaphysics of Sex

In keeping with his contemptuous view of modernity, Evola regarded modern sexual mores and forms of expression as degenerate. Just as Evola rejected modern evolutionary biology, so did he also oppose twentieth century approaches to the understanding of sexuality of the kind found in such fields as sociobiology, psychology, and the newly emergent discipline of sexology. Interestingly, Evola did not view the reproductive instinct in mankind to be the principal force driving sexuality and he criticized these academic disciplines for their efforts to interpret sexuality in terms of reproductive drives, regarding these efforts as a reflection of the materialistic reductionism which he so bitterly opposed. Evola’s use of the term “metaphysics” with regards to sexuality represents in part his efforts to differentiate what he considered to be the “first principles” of human sexuality from the merely biological instinct for the reproduction of the species, which he regarded as being among the basest and least meaningful aspects of sex. It is also interesting to note at this point that Evola himself never married or had children of his own. Nor is it known to what degree his own paralysis generated by injuries sustained during World War Two as a result of a 1945 Soviet bombing raid on Vienna affected his own reproductive capabilities or his views of sexuality.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Evola’s analysis of sex is his rejection of not only the reproductive instinct but also of love as the most profound dimension of sexuality. Evola’s thought on this matter is sharp departure from the dominant forces in traditional Western thought with regards to sexual ethics. Plato postulated a kind of love that transcends the sexual and rises above it, thereby remaining non-sexual in nature. The Christian tradition subjects the sexual impulse and act to a form of sacralization by which the process of creating life becomes a manifestation of the divine order. Hence, the traditional Christian taboos against non-procreative sexual acts. Modern humanism of a secular-liberal nature elevates romantic love to the highest form of sexual expression. Hence, the otherwise inexplicable phenomena of the modern liberal embrace of non-procreative, non-marital or even homosexual forms of sexual expression, while maintaining something of a taboo against forms of non-romantic sexual expression such as prostitution or forms of sexuality and sexual expression regarded as incompatible with the egalitarian ethos of liberalism, such as polygamy or “sexist” pornography.

Evola’s own thought regarding sexuality diverges sharply from that of the Platonic ideal, the Christians, and the moderns alike. For Evola, sexuality has as its first purpose the achievement of unity in two distinctive ways. The first of these is the unity of the male and female dichotomy that defines the sexual division of the human species. Drawing once again on primordial traditions, Evola turns to the classical Greek myth of Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite who was believed to be a manifestation of both genders and who was depicted in the art of antiquity as having a male penis with female breasts in the same manner as the modern “she-male.” The writings of Ovid depict Hermaphroditus as a beautiful young boy who was seduced by the nymph Salmacis and subsequently transformed into a male/female hybrid as a result of the union. The depiction of this story in the work of Theophrastus indicates that Hermaphroditus symbolized the marital union of a man and woman.

The concept of unity figures prominently in the Evolan view of sexuality on another level. Just as the sexual act is an attempt at reunification of the male and female division of the species, so is sexuality also an attempt to reunite the physical element of the human being with the spiritual. Again, Evola departs from the Platonic, Christian, and modern views of sexuality. The classical and the modern overemphasize such characteristics as romantic love or aesthetic beauty in Evola’s view, while the Christian sacralization of sexuality relegates the physical aspect to the level of the profane. However, Evola does not reject the notion of a profane dimension to sexuality. Instead, Evola distinguishes the profane from the transcendent. Profane expressions of sexuality are those of a non-transcendent nature. These can include both the hedonic pursuit of sexual pleasure as an end unto itself, but it also includes sexual acts with romantic love as their end.

Indeed, Evola’s analysis of sexuality would be shockingly offensive to the sensibilities of traditionalists within the Abrahamic cults and those of modern liberal humanists alike. Evola is as forthright as any of the modern left-wing sexologists of his mid-twentieth century era (for instance, Alfred Kinsey6 or Wilhelm Reich7) in the frankness of his discussion of the many dimensions of human sexuality, including sexual conduct of the most fringe nature. Some on the contemporary “far Right” of nationalist politics have attempted to portray Evola’s view of homosexuality as the equivalent of that of a conventional Christian “homophobe.” Yet a full viewing of Evola’s writing on the homosexual questions does not lend itself to such an interpretation. The following passage fromThe Metaphysics of Sex is instructive on this issue:

In natural homosexuality or in the predisposition to it, the most straightforward explanation is provided by what we said earlier about the differing levels of sexual development and about the fact that the process of sexual development in its physical and, even more so, in its psychic aspects can be incomplete. In that way, the original bisexual nature is surpassed to a lesser extent than in a “normal” human being, the characteristics of one sex not being predominant over those of the other sex to the same extent. Next we must deal with what M. Hirschfeld called the “intermediate sexual forms”. In cases of this kind (for instance, when a person who is nominally a man is only 60 percent male) it is impossible that the erotic attraction based on the polarity of the sexes in heterosexuality – which is much stronger the more the man is male and the woman is female – can also be born between individuals who, according to the birth registry and as regards only the so-called primary sexual characteristics, belong to the same sex, because in actual fact they are “intermediate forms”. In the case of pederasts, Ulrich said rightly that it is possible to find “the soul of a woman born in the body of a man”.

But it is necessary to take into account the possibility of constitutional mutations, a possibility that has been given little consideration by sexologists; that is, we must also bear in mind cases of regression. It may be that the governing power on which the sexual nature of a given individual depends (a nature that is truly male or truly female) may grow weak through neutralization, atrophy, or reduction of the latent state of the characteristics of the other sex, and this may lead to the activation and emergence of these recessive characteristics. And here the surroundings and the general atmosphere of society can play a not unimportant part. In a civilization where equality is the standard, where differences are not linked, where promiscuity is a favor, where the ancient idea of “being true to oneself” means nothing anymore – in such a splintered and materialistic society, it is clear that this phenomenon of regression and homosexuality should be particularly welcome, and therefore it is in no way a surprise to see the alarming increase in homosexuality and the “third sex” in the latest “democratic” period, or an increase in sex changes to an extent unparalleled in other eras.8

In his recognition of the possibility of “the soul of a woman born in the body of man” or “intermediate” sexual forms, Evola’s language and analysis somewhat resembles the contemporary cultural Left’s fascination with the “transgendered” or the “intersexed.” Where Evola’s thought is to be most sharply differentiated from that of modern leftists is not on the matter of sex-phobia, but on the question of sexual egalitarianism. Unlike the Christian puritans who regard deviants from the heterosexual, procreative sexual paradigm as criminals against the natural order, Evola apparently understood the existence of such “sexual identities” as a naturally occurring phenomenon. Unlike modern liberals, Evola opposed the elevation of such sexual identities or practices to the level of equivalence with “normal” procreative and kinship related forms of sexual expression and relationship. On the contemporary question of same-sex marriage, for example, Evolan thought recognizes that the purpose of marriage is not individual gratification, but the construction of an institution for the reproduction of the species and the proliferation and rearing of offspring. An implication of Evola’s thought on these questions for conservative revolutionaries in the twenty-first century is that the populations conventionally labeled as sexual deviants by societies where the Abrahamic cults shape the wider cultural paradigm need not be shunned, despised, feared, or subject to persecution. Homosexuals, for instance, have clearly made important contributions to Western civilization. However, the liberal project of elevating either romantic love or hedonic gratification as the highest end of sexuality, and of equalizing “normal” and “deviant” forms of sexual expression, must likewise be rejected if relationships between family, tribe, community, and nation are to be understood as the essence of civilization.

The nature of Evola’s opposition to modern pornography and the relationship of this opposition to his wider thought regarding sexuality is perhaps the most instructive with regards to the differentiation to be made between Evola’s outlook and that of Christian moralists. Evola’s opposition to pornography was not its explicit nature or its deviation from procreative, marital expressions of sexuality as the idealized norm. Indeed, Evola highly regarded sexual practices of a ritualized nature, including orgiastic religious rites of the kind found in certain forms of paganism, to be among the most idyllic forms of sexual expression of the highest, spiritualized variety. Christian puritans of the present era might well find Evola’s views on these matters to be even more appalling than those of ordinary contemporary liberals. Evola also considered ritualistic or ascetic celibacy to be such an idyllic form. The basis of Evola’s objection to pornography was its baseness, it commercial nature, and its hedonic ends, all of which Evola regarding as diminishing its erotic nature to the lowest possible level. Evola would no doubt regard the commercialized hyper-sexuality that dominates the mass media and popular culture of the Western world of the twenty-first century as a symptom rather than as a cause of the decadence of modernity.

Originally published in Thoughts & Perspectives: Evola, a compilation of essays on Julius Evola, published by ARKTOS.

Notes:

1 Wegierski, Mark. The New Right in Europe. Telos, Winter93/Spring94, Issue 98-99.

2 Evola, Julius. Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. English translation. New York: Inner Traditions, 1983. Originally published in Italy by Edizioni Meditterranee, 1969.

3 Evola, Julius. The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way. English translation by Guido Stucci. New York: Inner Traditions, 1992. Originally published in 1949.

4 Evola, Julius. Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. English translation by Guido Stucco. New York: Inner Traditions, 1995. From the 1969 edition. Originally published in Milan by Hoepli in 1934.

Evola, Julius. Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. English translation. New York: Inner Traditions, 1983. Originally published in Italy by Edizioni Meditterranee, 1969.

Evola, Julius. Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. English translation by Guido Stucco. New York: Inner Traditions, 1995. From the 1969 edition. Originally published in Milan by Hoepli in 1934.

Evola, Julius. The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way. English translation by Guido Stucci. New York: Inner Traditions, 1992. Originally published in 1949.

Nazi Fashion Wars:

The Evolian Revolt Against Aphroditism in the Third Reich

Part 1

Amanda Bradley

“We would like women to remain women in their nature, in the whole of their lives, in the aim and fulfilment of these lives, just as we likewise wish men to remain men in their nature and in the aim and fulfilment of their nature and their aims.”—Adolf Hitler

National Socialism promoted two images of woman: the hardworking peasant mother in traditional dress, and the uniformed woman in service to her people. Both images were an attempt to combat two types of woman that are foreign to Traditional European societies: the Aphrodisian and Amazonian woman.

To understand the implications of these types, we must first outline J. J. Bachofen’s theory of the phases of human development and their relation to the Traditionalism of Julius Evola, who translated Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right) into Italian and wrote the introduction. Bachofen posited a progressive view of history. The earliest and most primitive civilizations were earth-based, what Bachofen called “hetaerist-aphroditic,” since they were characterized by promiscuity.

As a revolt against the mistreatment of women in these early societies, Bachofen determined, agricultural-based Demetrian societies were developed. This phase of development was matriarchal, and exalted woman in her role of wife and mother, since it viewed woman and the earth as sources of generation.

Next, patriarchy developed, in which the sun and man were seen as the source of life. States of consciousness, correspondingly, went beyond the earth and the moon in solar-oriented societies.

Bachofen also outlined several regressions within his system. The cult of Dionysus was a regression from a Demetrian back into an earth-based cult, as exemplified by its emphasis on the vine (i.e., earth), a drunken dissolution into nature, and the promiscuous maenads who were its followers. Another regression was found in the various examples of Amazonian women in Western history, who did away with the need for a male principle.

Evola said that he integrated Bachofen’s ideas in “a wider and more up-to-date order of ideas.” [1]. He posits the Arctic cycle of the Golden Age as the primordial tradition. Demetrian societies came later, and eventually declined into Amazonian and Aphrodisian cycles. Meanwhile, there were descents into Titanic and Dionysian cycles, with a brief revival of the Northern spirit in the heroic age. Although Evola and Bachofen disagreed about the primacy of the Northern tradition, their interpretations of Aphroditism and other degenerations are similar.

As an earth-based society, the Aphrodisian is entirely focused on the material world. These societies are ruled by “the natural law (ius naturale) of sex motivated by lust, and with no understanding of the relationship of intercourse to conception.” [2] Even the afterlife is viewed not as an ascent to a heaven, but a return to nature. Bachofen describes woman’s status in these cultures as the lowest—she is only a sex object, the property of the tribal chief or any man who wants her. Evola’s interpretation is that in Aphrodisian societies, it is man’s status that is the lowest, since woman is the “sovereign of the man who is merely slave of his senses and sexuality, merely the ‘telluric’ being that finds its rest and its ecstasy only in the woman.” [3] Whether interpreting Aphrodisian societies as degrading to men, women, or both, one aspect is clear: Such a worldview emphasizes the lower aspects of sex, and presents woman as an object of base lust. Contrasted to this are Demetrian societies, in which monogamy and the love of the wife and mother replace mere lust.

Such Aphrodisian cultures are found only in pre-Aryan and anti-Aryan societies. In the history of the West, Evola theorizes that solar-based societies originally were found throughout Europe. In the more southern areas of Europe, in the timeline of recorded history at least, the solar forces did not withstand opposing forces for long. According to Joseph Campbell, these earth and lunar forces migrated to the Mediterranean from the East, as the Oriental principle was found in the “Aphroditic, Demetrian, and Dionysian legacies of the Sabines and Etruscans, Hellenistic Carthage and, finally, Cleopatra’s Hellenistic Egypt.”[4] Thus, much of what we associate with classical Greece cannot be assumed to be European, but must be interpreted in light of the degenerations that developed from its contact with the East. Rome, according to Evola, was able to ward off the influence of the telluric-maternal cult due to its establishment of a firm political organization that was centered on the virile principles of a solar worldview.

In addition to the spheres of love and family, Aphrodisian societies have far-reaching political implications as well. Earth and lunar cults were not necessarily (in fact, rarely) governed by women, yet like gynaecocracy, they foster “the egalitarism of the natural law, universalism and communism.” The idea is that Aphrodisian, earth-based societies viewed all men as children of one earth. Thus, “any inequality is an ‘injustice’, an outrage to the law of nature.” The ancient orgies, Evola writes, “were meant to celebrate the return of men to the state of nature through the momentary obliteration of any social difference and of any hierarchy.”[5] This also explains why in some cultures, the lower castes practiced tellurian or lunar rites, while solar rites were reserved for the aristocracy.

These were the Aphrodisian elements that had made their way into the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, and which the National Socialists tried to restrain, along with modern Amazonian woman (the unmarried, childless, career woman in mannish dress). The Aphrodite type was represented by the “movie ‘star’ or some similar fascinating Aphrodisian apparition.”[6] In his introduction to the writings of Bachofen, National Socialist scholar Alfred Baeumler wrote that the modern world has all of the characteristics of a gynaecocratic age. In writing about the European city-woman, he says, “The fascinating female is the idol of our times, and, with painted lips, she walks through the European cities as she once did through Babylon.”[7]

(PICTURE: Hungarian-born singer Marikka Rökk)

The Nazis’ attempts to combat the Aphrodisian type of woman were manifest in various campaigns and in the writings of Nazi leaders. Most prominent was the promotion of the Gretchen type (the Demetrian woman, in her role as mother and wife), and the discouragement of anything that encouraged the fall of woman into a sex toy rather than a partner for men. Primary emphasis was placed on the discouragement of provocative dress, makeup, and unnatural hair, all which have associations with earth-based cults from the East. According to Evola, the Jewish spirit emphasizes the materialist and sensualist sides of life, with the body viewed as a material instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of the spirit. Thus, ideologies such as cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, materialism, and feminism are prevalent in a society that has a worldview infused with a Semitic spirit.[8]

Evola categorized the Aryan spirit as solar and virile, and the Jewish spirit as lunar and feminine. Using Bachofen’s classification system, the latter classifies most easily with Aphrodisian and earth-based cultures — where woman-as-sex-object prevails over woman-as-mother. In fact, there were various versions of “royal Asian women with Aphrodisian features, above all in ancient civilizations of Semitic stock.”[9] A review of archaeological evidence of Aryan and Semitic peoples reveals that, indeed, the only records of Aphrodisian culture in the West (as determined by a culture’s molding of woman into a sex object through fashion, makeup, and the idea of unnatural beauty) are the result of Eastern influence.

Aphrodisian Fashion and Cosmetics Are Absent from the History of Northern Europeans, and Found in Mediterranean Cultures as a Result of Eastern Influence

European civilizations unanimously associated unnatural beauty, achieved by cosmetics and dyed hair, with the lowest castes. This is because in Traditional societies, “health” was a symbol of “virtue” — to feign health or beauty was an attempt to mask the Truth.[10] Although cosmetics and jewelry were used ritually in ancient civilizations, their use eventually degenerated into a purely materialistic function.

The earliest Europeans tended toward simplicity in dress and appearance. Adornments were used solely to signify caste or heroic deeds, or were amulets or talismans. In ancient Greece, jewels were never worn for everyday use, but reserved for special occasions and public appearances. In Rome, also, jewelry was thought to have a spiritual power.[11] Western fashion often was used to display rank, as in Roman patricians’ purple sash and red shoes. The Mediterranean cultures, influenced by the East, were the first to become extravagant in dress and makeup. By the time this influence spread to northern Europe, it had been Christianized, and makeup did not appear again in northern Europe until the fourteenth century, after which followed a long period of its association with immorality.[12]

There is no firm evidence, archeological or narrative, for the use of makeup among the Anglo-Saxons. Only one story exists about its use among the Vikings, that of tenth century A.D. traveler Ibrahim Al-Tartushi, who suggested that Vikings in Hedeby (in modern northern Germany) used kohl to protect against the evil eye (obviously an import from the East). Instead of makeup (outside of their often-described war paint), early northern Europeans focused on cleanliness and simplicity, as well as plant-based oils and aromatherapy. Archeological evidence reveals grooming tools for keeping hair tidy and teeth clean, and long hair was an essential beauty element for women.[13] Much of the jewelry worn by Vikings was religious, received as a reward for bravery in battle, or used to fasten clothing (such as brooches).[14]

Ancient Greece and Rome started out similar to northern Europe in the realms of fashion and beauty, but were quickly influenced by the East. Cosmetics were introduced to Rome from Egypt, and become associated with prostitutes and slaves. Prostitutes tended to use more makeup and perfume as they got older, practices that were looked down on as attempts to mask the unpleasant sights and odors of the lower classes. In fact, the Latin lenocinium means both “prostitution” and “makeup.” For a long time, cosmetics also were associated with non-white races, particular those from the Orient. As Rome degenerated, however, the use of makeup spread to many classes, with specialized slaves devoting much time to applying face paint to their masters, especially to lighten the skin color.

Although cosmetics became more accepted in Rome, their use was contrary to Roman beliefs and discouraged in their writings. Romans did not believe in “unnatural embellishment,” but only the preservation of natural beauty, for which there were many concoctions. Such unadulterated beauty was associated with chastity and morality. As an example, the Vestal Virgins did not use makeup. One who did, Postumia, was accused of incestum, a broad category that signifies immoral and irreligious acts.

In addition, Roman men found it suspicious when women tried to appear beautiful: the implications of cosmetic use included a lack of natural beauty, lack of chastity, potential for adultery, seductiveness, unnatural aversion to the traditional roles for women, manipulation, and deceitfulness. The poet Juvenal wrote, “a woman buys scents and lotions with adultery in mind.” Seneca believed the use of cosmetics was contributing to the decline in morality in the Rome Empire, and advised virtuous women to avoid them.[15] The only surviving text from Rome that approves of cosmetics, Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae (Cosmetics for the Female Face), gives natural remedies for whiter skin and blemishes but extols the virtues of good manners and a good disposition as highest of all beauty treatments.

Originally, the simplest hairstyles were prized in Rome, with women wearing their hair long, often with a headband. Younger girls favored a bun at the nape of the neck, or a knot on top of their head. Elaborate hairstyles only came into fashion during the Roman Empire as it degenerated.[16]

In ancient Greece, as well, makeup was the domain of lower-class women, who attempted to emulate the fair skin of the upper classes who stayed indoors. Rouge was sometimes used to give the skin a healthy and energetic glow. This tradition was continued by women in the Middle Ages, who also valued fair skin.

Cosmetics, dyed hair, and over-accessorizing continued to be associated with loose women as Western society was Christianized. Saint Irenaeus included cosmetics in a list of evils brought to the women who married fallen angels. The early Christian writers Clement of Alexandria, Tatian the Assyrian, and Tertullian also trace the origin of cosmetics to fallen angels.[17]

Dress presents a more difficult area to examine. Although the Nazis associated skimpy dress with foreign elements, this has not always been the case in West. Aryan societies generally did not moralize sex, nor see the body as shameful; women could show a bare breast or wear a short tunic without being viewed as a sex object. In fact, Bachofen reports that more restrictive dress represented a move toward Eastern cultures, which, seeing woman as temptress, insist on extensive covering. According to Plutarch, speaking on the old Dorian spirit:

There was nothing shameful about the nakedness of the virgins, for they were always accompanied by modesty and lechery was banned. Rather, it gave them a taste for simplicity and a care for outward dignity.[18]

Much of these distinctions in beauty treatments can be traced to deeper sources, to the differences in spirit of different peoples. Evola asserts the Roman spirit as the positive side of the Italian people, and the Mediterranean (more influenced by the East) as the negative that needs to be rectified. The first Mediterranean trait is “love for outward appearances and grand gestures”—it is the type that “needs a stage.” In such people, he says, there is a split in the personality: there is “an ‘I’ that plays the role and an ‘I’ that regards his part from the point of view of a possible observer or spectator, more or less as actors do.”

A different kind of split, one that instead supervises one’s conduct to avoid “primitive spontaneity,” is more befitting of the Roman character. The ancient Romans had a model of “sober, austere, active style, free form exhibitionism, measured, endowed with a calm awareness of one’s dignity.” Another negative trait of the Mediterranean type, Evola notes, is individualism, brought about by “the propensity toward outward appearances.” Evola also cites “concern for appearances but with little or no substance” as typical of the Mediterranean type.[19] Such differences in spirit will manifest in the material choices that are inherent to different peoples.

Nazi Fashion Wars:The Evolian Revolt Against Aphroditism in the Third Reich, Part 2

Jewish Views on Jewelry and Cosmetics as Aphrodisian, Jewish Involvement in the Fashion Industry, and the Reaction of Germany

There is much archeological evidence for cosmetics and other beauty treatments in the East, particularly in Egypt and Asia. In Arab cultures, cosmetic use is traced back to ancient times, and there are no prohibitions in Islamic law against cosmetics. Though a simple use of makeup or hair dye could not be evidence of an Aphrodisian belief system, if such use is intended to limit woman’s role to the sexual realm, then we can assume there are elements of the culture that are earth-based and opposed to the Aryan solar cults.

Judaism is not historically opposed to cosmetics and jewelry, although two stories can be interpreted as negative indictments on cosmetics and too much finery: Esther rejected beauty treatments before her presentation to the Persian king, indicating that the highest beauty is pure and natural; and Jezebel, who dressed in finery and eye makeup before her death, may the root of some associations between makeup and prostitutes.

In most cases, however, Jewish views on cosmetics and jewelry tend to be positive and indicate woman’s role as sexual: “In the rabbinic culture, ornamentation, attractive dress and cosmetics are considered entirely appropriate to the woman in her ordained role of sexual partner.” In addition to daily use, cosmetics also are allowed on holidays on which work (including painting, drawing, and other arts) are forbidden; the idea is that since it is pleasurable for women to fix themselves up, it does not fall into the prohibited category of work.[1]

In addition to the historical distinctions between cultures on cosmetics, jewelry, and fashion, the modern era has demonstrated that certain races enter industries associated with the Aphrodisian worldview more than others. Overwhelmingly, Jews are overrepresented in all of these arenas. Following World War I, the beauty and fashion industries became dominated by huge corporations, many of the Jewish-owned. Of the four cosmetics pioneers — Helena Rubenstein, Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder (née Mentzer), and Charles Revson (founder of Revlon) — only Elizabeth Arden was not Jewish. In addition, more than 50 percent of department stores in America today were started or run by Jews. (Click here for information about Jewish department stores and jewelers, and here for Jewish fashion designers).

Hitler was not the only one who noticed Jewish influence in fashion and thought it harmful. Already in Germany, a belief existed that Jewish women were “prone to excess and extravagance in their clothing.” In addition, Jews were accused of purposefully denigrating women by designing immoral, trashy clothing for German women.[2] There was an economic aspect to the opposition of Jews in fashion, as many Germans thought them responsible for driving smaller, German-owned clothiers out of business. In 1933, an organization was founded to remove Jews from the Germany fashion industry. Adefa “came about not because of any orders emanating from high within the state hierarchy. Rather, it was founded and membered by persons working in the fashion industry.”[3] According to Adefa’s figures, Jewish participation was 35 percent in men’s outerwear, hats, and accessories; 40 percent in underclothing; 55 percent in the fur industry; and 70 percent in women’s outerwear.[4]

Although many Germans disliked the Jewish influence in beauty and fashion, it was recognized that the problem was not so much what particular foreign race was impacting German women, but that any foreign influence was shaping their lives and altering their spirit. The Nazis obviously were aware of the power of dress and beauty regimes to impact the core of woman’s self-image and being. According to Agnes Gerlach, chairwoman for the Association for German Women’s Culture:

Not only is the beauty ideal of another race physically different, but the position of a woman in another country will be different in its inclination. It depends on the race if a woman is respected as a free person or as a kept female. These basic attitudes also influence the clothes of a woman. The southern ‘showtype’ will subordinate her clothes to presentation, the Nordic ‘achievement type’ to activity. The southern ideal is the young lover; the Nordic ideal is the motherly woman. Exhibitionism leads to the deformation of the body, while being active obligates caring for the body. These hints already show what falsifying and degenerating influences emanate from a fashion born of foreign law and a foreign race.[5]

Gerlach’s statements echo descriptions of Aphrodisian cultures entirely: Some cultures view women as a sex object, and elements of promiscuity run through all areas of women’s dress and toilette; Aryan cultures have a broader understanding of the possibilities of the female being and celebrate woman’s natural beauty.

The Introduction of Aphrodisian Elements into Germany and the Beginning of the Fashion Battles

Long before the Third Reich, Germans battled the French on the field of fashion; it was a battle between the Aphrodisian culture that had made its way to France, and the Demetrian placement of woman as a wife and mother. As early as the 1600s, German satirical picture sheets were distributed that showed the “Latin morals, manners, customs, and vanity” of the French as threatening Nordic culture in Germany. In the twentieth century, Paris was the height of high fashion, and as tensions between the two countries increased, the French increased their derogatory characterizations of German women for not being stereotypically Aphrodisian. In 1914, a Parisian comic book presented Germans as “a nation of fat, unrefined, badly dressed clowns.”[6] And in 1917, a French depiction of “Virtuous Germania” shows her as “a fat, large-breasted, mean-looking woman, with a severe scowl on her chubby face.”[7]

Hitler saw the French fashion conglomerate as a manifestation of the Jewish spirit, and it was common to hear that Paris was controlled by Jews. Women were discouraged from wearing foreign modes of dress such as those in the Jewish and Parisian shops: “Sex appeal was considered to be ‘Jewish cosmopolitanism’, whilst slimming cures were frowned upon as counter to the birth drive.”[8] Thus, the Nazis staunch stance against anything French was in part a reaction to the Latin qualities of French culture, which had migrated to the Mediterranean thousands of years earlier, and that set the highest image of woman as something German men did not want: “a frivolous play toy that superficially only thinks about pleasure, adorns herself with trinkets and spangles, and resembles a glittering vessel, the interior of which is hollow and desolate.”[9] Such values had no place in National Socialism, which promoted autarky, frugalness, respect for the earth’s resources, natural beauty, a true religiosity (Christian at first, with the eventual goal to return to paganism), devotion to higher causes (such as to God and the state), service to one’s community, and the role of women as a wife and mother.

Opposition to the Aphrodisian Culture in the Third Reich

Most students of Third Reich history are familiar with the more popular efforts to shape women’s lives: the Lebensborn program for unwed mothers, interest-free loans for marriage and children, and propaganda posters that emphasized health and motherhood. But some of the largest battles in the fight for women occurred almost entirely within the sphere of fashion—in magazines, beauty salons, and women’s organizations.

The Nazis did not discount fashion, only its Aphrodisian manifestations. On the contrary, they understood fashion as a powerful political tool in shaping the mores of generations of women. Fashion and beauty also were recognized as important elements in the cultural revolution that is necessary for lasting political change. German author Stafan Zweig commented on fashion in the 1920s:

Today its dictatorship becomes universal in a heartbeat. No emperor, no khan in the history of the world ever experienced a similar power, no spiritual commandment a similar speed. Christianity and socialism required centuries and decades to win their followings, to enforce their commandments on as many people as a modern Parisian tailor enslaves in eight days.[10]

Thus, Nazi Germany established a fashion bureau and numerous women’s organizations as active forces of cultural hegemony. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the national leader of the NS-Frauenschaft (NSF, or National Socialist Women’s League), said the organization’s aim was to show women how their small actions could impact the entire nation.[11] Many of these “small actions” involved daily choices about dress, shopping, health, and hygiene.

The biggest enemies of women, according to the Nazi regime, were those un-German forces that worked to denigrate the German woman. These included Parisian high fashion and cosmetics, Jewish fashion, and the Hollywood image of the heavily made up, cigarette-smoking vamp—the archetype of the Aphrodisian. These forces not only impacted women’s clothing, personal care choices, and activities, but were dangerous since they touched the German woman’s very spirit.

Although the image of the dirndl-wearing woman working the fields was heavily promoted, Hitler was not anti-fashion and realized the value in beautiful dress and that in order to retain women’s support, he could not do away with their luxury items completely. Part of the reason he opposed Joseph Goebbels’ 1944 plans to close fashion houses and beauty parlors was not because he disagreed, but because he was “fearful that this would antagonize German women,” particular those of the middle classes who he relied on for support.[12] Hitler showed his concern for tasteful clothing when he rejected the first design of girls’ uniforms for the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, League of German Girls) as “old sacks” and said the look should not be “too primitive.”[13] And in a conference with party leaders he said:

Clothing should not now suddenly return to the Stone Age; one should remain where we are now. I am of the opinion that when one wants a coat made, one can allow it to be made handsomely. It doesn’t become more expensive because of that. . . . Is it really something so horrible when [a woman] looks pretty? Let’s be honest, we all like to see it.[14]

Though understanding the need for tasteful and beautiful dress, the Nazis were adamantly against elements foreign to the Nordic spirit. The list included foreign fashion, trousers, provocative clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, hair alterations (such as coloring and permanents), extensive eyebrow plucking, dieting, alcohol, and smoking. In February 1916, the government issued a list of “forbidden luxury items” that included foreign (i.e., French) cosmetics and perfumes.[15] Permanents and hair coloring were strongly discouraged. Although the Nazis were against provocative clothing in everyday dress, they encouraged sportiness and were certainly not prudish about young girls wearing shorts to exercise. A parallel can be seen in the scanty dress worn by Spartan girls during their exercises, a civilization characterized by its Nordic spirit and solar-orientation.

Some have said that Hitler was opposed to cosmetics because of his vegetarian leanings, since cosmetics were made from animal byproducts. More likely, he retained the same views that kept women from wearing makeup for centuries in Western countries—the innate understanding that the Aphrodisian woman is opposed to Aryan culture. Nazi proponents said “red lips and painted cheeks suited the ‘Oriental’ or ‘Southern’ woman, but such artificial means only falsified the true beauty and femininity of the German woman.”[16] Others said that any amount of makeup or jewelry was considered “sluttish.”[17] Magazines in the Third Reich still carried advertisements for perfumes and cosmetics, but articles started advocating minimal, natural-looking makeup, for the truth was that most women were unable to pull off a fresh and healthy image without a little help from cosmetics.

Although jewelry and cosmetics were not banned, many areas of the Third Reich were impossible to enter unless conforming to Nazi ideals. In 1933, “painted” women were banned from Kreisleitung party meetings in Breslau. Women in the Lebensborn program were not allowed to use lipstick, pluck their eyebrows, or paint their nails.[18] When in uniform, women were forbidden to wear conspicuous jewelry, brightly colored gloves, bright purses, and obvious makeup.[19] The BDM also was influential in shaping fashion in the regime, with young girls taking up the use of clever pejoratives to reinforce the regime’s message that unnatural beauty was not Aryan. The Reich Youth Leader said:

The BDM does not subscribe to the untruthful ideal of a painted and external beauty, but rather strives for an honest beauty, which is situated in the harmonious training of the body and in the noble triad of body, soul, and mind. Staunch BDM members whole-heartedly embraced the message, and called those women who cosmetically tried to attain the Aryan female ideal ‘n2 (nordic ninnies)’ or ‘b3 (blue-eyed, blonde blithering idiots).’[20]

The Nazis offered many alternatives to Aphrodisian values: beauty would be derived from good character, exercise outdoors, a good diet, healthy skin free of the harsh chemicals in makeup, comfortable (yet still stylish and flattering) clothing, and from the love for her husband, children, home, and country. The most encouraged hairstyles were in buns or plaits—styles that saved money on trips to the beauty salon and were seen as more wholesome and befitting of the German character. In fact, Tracht (traditional German dress) was viewed as not merely clothing, but also as “the expression of a spiritual demeanor and a feeling of worth . . . Outwardly, it conveys the expression of the steadfastness and solid unity of the rural community.”[21] Foreign clothing designs, according to Gerlach, led to physical and “psychological distortion and damage, and thereby to national and racial deterioration.”[22]

* * *

Some people may be inclined to interpret Aphrodisian culture as positive for the sexes—it puts the emphasis for women not on careers but on their existence as sexual beings. Men often encourage such behavior by their dating choices and by complimenting an Aphrodisian “look” in women. But Aphrodisian culture is not only damaging to women, as Bachofen relates, by reducing them to the status of sex slave of multiple men. It also is degrading for men, at the level of personality and at the deepest levels of being. As Evola writes about the degeneration into Aphroditism:

The chthonic and infernal nature penetrates the virile principle and lowers it to a phallic level. The woman now dominates man as he becomes enslaved to the senses and a mere instrument of procreation. Vis-à-vis the Aphrodistic goddess, the divine male is subjected to the magic of the feminine principle and is reduced to the likes of an earthly demon or a god of the fecundating waters—in other words, to an insufficient and dark power.[23]

(PICTURE: Swedish singer Zarah Leander)

Aphroditism also contributes to the loss of wonder that is essential to a transcendent-based worldview, since many now find it hard to be moved by the ordinary. Josef Pieper discusses the importance of being able to see the divine in the natural:

If someone needs the ‘unusual’ to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous, the mirandum, of being. The hunger for the sensational . . . is an unmistakable sign of the loss of the true power of wonder, for a bourgeois-ized humanity.[24]

A society that promotes so much unnatural beauty will no doubt lose the ability to experience the wondrous in the natural. It is essential that people retain the ability to love and be moved by the pure and natural, in order to once again return to a civilization centered in a Traditional Aryan worldview.

vendredi, 17 décembre 2010

In a 1913 letter D. H. Lawrence writes that “it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women.” Lawrence’s views about relations between the sexes, and about sex differences are perhaps his most controversial – and they have frequently been misrepresented. But before we delve into those views, let us ask why it should be the case that establishing a new relation between men and women is “the problem of to-day.” The reason is fairly obvious. The species divides itself into male and female, reproduces itself thereby, and the overwhelming majority of human beings seek their fulfillment in a relationship to the opposite sex. If relations between the sexes have somehow been crippled—as Lawrence believes they have been—then this is a catastrophe. It is hard to imagine a greater, more pressing problem.

Lawrence came to relations with women bearing serious doubts about his own manhood, and with the conviction that his nature was fundamentally androgynous. Throughout his life, but especially as a boy, it was easier for him to relate to women and to form close bonds with them. Thus, when Lawrence discusses the nature of woman he draws not only upon his experiences with women, but also upon his understanding of his own nature. One of the questions we must examine is whether, in doing so, Lawrence was led astray. After all, Lawrence eventually came to repudiate the idea of any sort of fundamental androgyny and to claim that men and women are radically different. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he writes, “We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes.” Lawrence wrote this in 1921 intending it to be provocative, but it is surely much more controversial in today’s world, where it has become a dogma in some circles to insist that sex differences (now called “gender differences”) are “socially constructed.” Lawrence continues: “There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse, men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.”

Lawrence saw relations between the sexes as essentially a war. He tells us in his essay “Love” that all love between men and women is “dual, a love which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification of being burnt down, burnt into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness.” The love between men and women is a fusing—or a will to fusing—but one that never fully takes place because the relation is also fundamentally frictional. Again and again Lawrence emphasizes the idea that men and women are metaphysically different. In other words, they have different, and even opposed ways of being in the world. They are not just anatomically different; they have different ways of thinking and feeling, and achieve satisfaction and fulfillment in life through different means.

Lawrence’s view of the difference between the sexes can be fruitfully compared to the Chinese theory of yin and yang. These concepts are of great antiquity, but the way in which they are generally understood today is the product of an ambitious intellectual synthesis that took place under the early Han dynasty (207 B.C.–9 A.D.). According to this philosophy, the universe is shot through with an ultimate principle or power known as the Tao. However, the Tao divides itself into two opposing principles, yin and yang. These oppose yet complement each other. Yang manifests itself in maleness, hardness, harshness, dominance, heat, light, and the sun, amongst other things. Yin manifests itself in femaleness, softness, gentleness, yielding, cold, darkness, the moon, etc.

Contrary to the impression these lists might give, however, yang is not regarded as “superior” to yin; hardness is not superior to softness, nor is dominance superior to yielding. Each requires the other and cannot exist without the other. In certain situations a yang approach or condition is to be preferred, in others a yin approach. On occasion, yang may predominate to the point where it becomes harmful, and it must be counterbalanced by yin, or vice versa. (These principles are of central importance, for example, in traditional Chinese medicine.) The Tao Te Ching, a work written by a man chiefly for men extols the virtues of yin, and continually advises one to choose yin ways over yang. Lao-Tzu tells us over and over that it is “best to be like water,” that “those who control, fail. Those who grasp, lose,” and that “soft and weak overcome stiff and strong.”

Like the Taoists, Lawrence regards maleness and femaleness as opposed, yet complementary. It is not the case that the male, or the male way of being, is superior to the female, or vice versa. In a sense the sexes are equal, yet equality does not mean sameness. The error of male chauvinism is in thinking that one way, the male way, is superior; that dominance and hardness are just “obviously” superior to their opposites.

Yet the same error is committed by some who call themselves feminists. Tacitly, they assume that the male or yang characteristics are superior, and enjoin women to seek fulfillment in life through cultivating those traits in themselves. To those who might wonder whether such a program is possible, to say nothing of desirable, the theory of the “social construction of gender” is today being offered as support. According to this view, the only inherent differences between men and women are anatomical, and all of the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral characteristics attributed to the sexes throughout history have actually been the product of culture and environment. (And so “yin and yang,” according to this view, is really a rather naïve philosophy which confuses nurture with nature.) Clearly, Lawrence would reject this theory. In doing so, he is on very solid ground.

It would, of course, be foolish not to recognize that some “masculine” and “feminine” traits are culturally conditioned. An obvious example would be the prevailing view in American culture that a truly “masculine” man is unable, without the help of women or gay men, to color-coordinate his wardrobe. However, when one sees certain traits in men and women displaying themselves consistently in all cultures and throughout all of human history it makes sense to speak of masculine and feminine natures. It is plausible to argue that a trait is culturally conditioned only if it shows up in some cultures but not in others. Unfortunately, the “social construction of gender” thesis has achieved the status of a dogma in academic circles. And, in truth, ultimately it has to be asserted as dogma since believing in it requires that we ignore the evidence of human history, profound philosophies such as Taoism, and most of the scientific research into sex differences that has taken place over the last one hundred years.

I said earlier that Lawrence believes men and women to be “metaphysically different,” and in his essay “A Study of Thomas Hardy” he does indeed write as if he believes they actually see the world with a different metaphysics in mind:

It were a male conception to see God with a manifold Being, even though He be One God. For man is ever keenly aware of the multiplicity of things, and their diversity. But woman, issuing from the other end of infinity, coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation, is obsessed by the oneness of things, the One Being, undifferentiated. Man, on the other hand, coming forth as the desire to single out one thing from another, to reduce each thing to its intrinsic self by process of elimination, cannot but be possessed by the infinite diversity and contrariety in life, by a passionate sense of isolation, and a poignant yearning to be at one.

So, men seek or are preoccupied with multiplicity, and women with unity. What are we to make of such a bizarre claim? First of all, it seems to run counter to the Greek tradition, especially that of the Pythagoreans, which tended to identify the One with the masculine, and the Many with the feminine. However, if one looks to Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher Lawrence was particularly keen on, one finds a different story. Empedocles posits two fundamental forces which are responsible for all change in the universe: Love and Strife. Love, at the purely physical level, is a force of attraction. It draws things together, and without the intervention of Strife it would result in a monistic universe in which only one being existed. Strife breaks up and divides. It is a force of repulsion and separation. Now, Empedocles seems to identify Love with Aphrodite, and we may infer, though he does not say so, that Strife is Ares. In other words, he identifies his two forces with the archetypal female and male. This can offer us a clue as to what Lawrence is up to.

In Lawrence’s view, it is the female who wants to draw things, especially people, together. It is the female who yearns to heal divisions, to break down barriers. “Coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation” she seeks to overcome separateness through feeling, primarily through love. In the family situation, it is the female who tries to unite and overcome discord through love, whereas it is the male, typically, who frustrates this through the insistence on rules and distinctions. The ideal of universal love and an end to strife and division is fundamentally feminine—one which men, throughout history, have continually frustrated. It is characteristic of men to make war, and characteristic of women, no matter what cause or principle is involved, to object and to call for peace and unity.

Now the male, as Lawrence puts it, suffers from a sense of isolation, and a “yearning to be one.” He yearns for oneness, in fact, as the male yearns for the female. Yet his entire being disposes him to see the world in terms of its distinctness, and, indeed, to make a world rife with distinctions. Lawrence implies that polytheism is a “male” religion, and monotheism a “female” one. It is easy to see the logic involved in this. Polytheism sees the divine being that permeates the world as many because the world is itself many. Further, societies with polytheistic religions have always been keenly aware of ethnic and social differences, differences within the society (as in the Indian caste system), and between societies. Monotheism, on the other hand, tends toward universalism. Christianity especially, however it has actually been practiced, declares all men equal in the sight of God and calls for peace and unity in the world. (Lawrence, as we shall see later on, does indeed regard Christianity as a “feminine” religion, and blames it, in part, for feminizing Western men.)

This fundamental, metaphysical difference has the consequence that men and women do, in a real sense, live in different worlds. But perhaps such a formulation reflects a male bias towards differentiation. It is equally correct to say, in a more “feminine” formulation, that it is the same world seen in two, complementary ways. Indeed, it may be the case that it is difficult to see, from a male perspective, how the two sexes and their different ways of thinking and perceiving can achieve a rapprochement. Lawrence believes, of course, that they can live together, and that their opposite tendencies can be harmonized. In this way he is like Heraclitus, Lawrence’s favorite pre-Socratic, when he says “what is opposed brings together; the finest harmony is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife.” Heraclitus also tells us that “They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it [the Logos] agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and lyre.” In order to make a lyre or a bow, the two opposite ends of a piece of wood must be bent towards each other, never meeting, but held in tension. Their tension and opposition makes possible beautiful music, in the case of the lyre, and the propulsion of an arrow, in the case of the bow. Both involve a harmony through opposition.

In a 1923 newspaper interview Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction. But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Here Lawrence uses an image he was very fond of: women are at the center, the hub. This is because they are closer to “the source” than men are.

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence tells us “The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.” Lawrence believes that men yearn for purposive, creative activity, which involves moving away from the source. However, the energy and inspiration for purposive activity is drawn from the source, and so there is a complementary movement back towards it.

In The Rainbow, Lawrence describes how Tom Brangwen, besotted with his wife, seems to lose himself in a sensual obsession with her, and with knowing her sexually. But gradually,

Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to the outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently active, that it set another man in him free. And this new man turned with interest to public life, to see what part he could take in it. This would give him scope for new activity, activity of a kind for which he was now created and released. He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind.

Sex is one means of contacting the source. Men contact the source through women. This does not mean, of course, that blood-consciousness is in women but not in men. Rather, it means that in most men the blood-consciousness in them is “activated” primarily through their relationship to women. Second, in women blood-consciousness is more dominant than it is in men. Women are more intuitive than men; they operate more on the basis of feeling than intellect. It should not be necessary to point out that whereas such an observation might, in another author, be taken as a denigration of women, in Lawrence it is actually high praise. Women are also much more in tune with their bodies and bodily cycles than men are. Men tend to see their bodies as adversaries that must be whipped into shape.

When Lawrence continually tells us that we must find a way to reawaken the blood-consciousness in us, he is writing primarily for men. Women are already there—or, at least, they can get there with less effort. There is an old adage: “Women are, but men must become.” To be feminine is a constant state that a woman has as her birthright. Masculinity, on the other hand, is something men must achieve and prove. Rousseau in Emile states “The male is male only at certain moments, the female is female all of her life, or at least all her youth.” We exhort boys to “be a man,” but never does one hear girls told to “be a woman.” One can compliment a man simply by saying “he’s a man,” whereas “she’s a woman” seems mere statement of fact. The psychological difference between masculinity and femininity mirrors the biological fact that all fetuses begin as female; something must happen to them in order to make them male. It also articulates what is behind the strange conviction many men have had, including many great poets and artists, that woman is somehow the keeper of life’s mysteries; the one closest to the well-spring of nature.

In “A Study of Thomas Hardy,” Lawrence states that “in a man’s life, the female is the swivel and centre on which he turns closely, producing his movement.” Goethe tells us “Das ewig Weiblich zieht uns hinan” (“The Eternal Feminine draws us onwards”). The female, the male’s source of the source, stands at the center of his life. The woman as personification of the life mystery entices him to come together with her, and through their coupling the life mystery perpetuates itself. But he is not, ultimately, satisfied by this coupling. He goes forth into the world, his body renewed by his contact with the woman, but full of desire to know this mystery more adequately, and to be its vehicle through creative expression.

Without a woman, a man feels unmoored and ungrounded, for without a woman he has no center in his life. A man—a heterosexual man—can never feel fulfilled and can never reach his full potential without a woman to whom he can turn. As to homosexual men, it is a well-known fact that many cultivate in themselves characteristics that have been traditionally usually associated with woman: refined taste in clothing and decoration, cooking, gardening, etc. What these characteristics have in common is connectedness to the pleasures of the moment, and to the rhythms and necessities of life. Men are normally purpose-driven and future-oriented. They tend to overlook those aspects of life that please, but lack any greater purpose other than pleasing. They tend, therefore, to be somewhat insensitive to their surroundings, to color, to texture, to odor, to taste. They tend, in short, to be so focused upon doing, that they miss out on being. Heterosexual men look to women to ground them, and to provide these ingredients to life—ingredients which, in truth, make life livable. Homosexual men must make a woman within themselves, in order to be grounded. (This does not mean, however, that they must become effeminate – see my review essay of Jack Donovan’s Androphilia for more details.)

Homosexual men are, of course, the exception not the rule. Lawrence writes, of the typical man, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” And what of the woman? What does she desire? Lawrence tells us that “the vital desire of every woman is that she shall be clasped as axle to the hub of the man, that his motion shall portray her motionlessness, convey her static being into movement, complete and radiating out into infinity, starting from her stable eternality, and reaching eternity again, after having covered the whole of time.” Man is the “doer,” the actor, whereas woman need do nothing. Just by being woman she becomes the center of a man’s universe.

The dark side of this, in Lawrence’s view, is a tendency in women towards possessiveness, and towards wanting to make themselves not just the center of a man’s life but his sole concern. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s describes at length Rupert Birkin’s process of wrestling with this aspect of femininity:

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.

Birkin sees these qualities in Ursula, with whom he is in love. “She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended.” He feels she wants, in a way, to worship him, but “to worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.”

Woman’s possessiveness is understandable given that the man is necessary to her well-being: she is only happy if she is center to the orbit and activity of some man. Again, for Lawrence, such a claim does not denigrate women, for he has already as much as said that a man is nothing without a woman. Nevertheless, some will see in this view of men and woman a sexism that places the man above the woman. From Lawrence’s perspective, this is illusory. It is true that the man is “doer,” but his perpetual need to act and to do stands in stark contrast to the woman, who need do nothing in order be who she is. It is true, further, that men’s ambition has given them power in the world, but it is a power that is nothing compared to that of the woman, who exercises her power without having to do anything. She reigns, without ruling. The man does what he does, but must return to the woman, and is “like a loose speck blown at random without her” – and he knows this. Much of misogyny may have to do with this. From the man’s perspective, the woman is all-powerful, and the source of her power a mystery.

Many modern feminists, however, conceive of power in an entirely male way, as the active power of doing. Lawrence recognized that in trying to cultivate this male power within themselves, women do not rise in the estimation of most men. Instead they are diminished, for men’s respect for and fascination with women springs entirely from the fact that unlike themselves women do not have to chase after an ideal of who they ought to be; they do not have to get caught up in the rat race in order to respect themselves. They can simply be; they can live, and take joy just in living.

One can make a rough distinction between two types of feminism. The most familiar type is what one might call the “woman on the street feminism,” which one encounters from average, working women, and which they imbibe from television, films, and magazines. This feminism essentially has as its aim claiming for women all that which formerly had been the province of men—including not only traditionally male jobs, but even male ways of speaking, moving, dressing, bonding, exercising, and displaying sexual interest. Ironically, this form of feminism is at root a form of masculinism, which makes traditionally masculine traits the hallmarks of the “liberated” or self-actualized human being.

The other type of feminism is usually to be found only in academia, though not all academic feminists subscribe to it. It insists that women have their own ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. Feminist philosophers have written of woman’s “ways of knowing” as distinct from men’s, and have even put forward the idea that women approach ethical decision-making in a markedly different way. It is this form of feminism to which Lawrence is closest. Lawrence’s writings are concerned with liberating both men and women from the tyranny of a modern civilization which cuts them off from their true natures. Liberation for modern women cannot mean becoming like modern men, for modern men are living in a condition of spiritual (as well as wage) slavery. In an essay on feminism, Wendell Berry writes

It is easy enough to see why women came to object to the role of [the comic strip character] Blondie, a mostly decorative custodian of a degraded, consumptive modern household, preoccupied with clothes, shopping, gossip, and outwitting her husband. But are we to assume that one may fittingly cease to be Blondie by becoming Dagwood? Is the life of a corporate underling—even acknowledging that corporate underlings are well paid—an acceptable end to our quest for human dignity and worth? . . . How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? [Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 69–70.]

I will return to this issue later.

Having now characterized, in broad strokes, Lawrence’s views on the differences between men and woman, I now turn to a more detailed discussion of each.

2. The Nature of Man

As we have seen, Lawrence believes that men (most men) need to have a woman in their lives. Their relationship to a woman serves to ground their lives, and to provide the man not only with a respite from the woes of the world, but with energy and inspiration. However, this is not the same thing as saying that the man makes the woman, or his relationship to her, the purpose of his life. In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child, the great centre of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.” This is because Lawrence believes that true satisfaction for men can come only from some form of creative, purposive activity outside the family.

Having a woman is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition for male happiness. In addition to a woman, he must have a purpose. Women, on the other hand, do not require a purpose beyond the home and the family in order to be happy. This is another of those claims that will rankle some, so let us consider two important points about what Lawrence has said. First, he is speaking of what he believes the typical woman is like, just as he is speaking of the typical man. There are at least a few exceptions to just about every generalization. Second, we must ask an absolutely crucial question of those who regard such claims as demeaning women: why is being occupied with home and family lesser than having a purpose (e.g., a career) outside the home? The argument could be made—and I think Lawrence would be sympathetic to this—that the traditional female role of making a home and raising children is just as important and possibly more important than the male activities pursued outside the home. Again, much of contemporary feminism sees things from a typically male point of view, and denigrates women who choose motherhood rather than one of the many meaningless, ulcer-producing careers that have long been the province of men.

Lawrence writes, “Primarily and supremely man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers.” Lawrence’s male bias creeps in here a bit, as he romanticizes the “dauntless” male soul. Men and women always believe, in their heart of hearts, that their ways are superior. Nevertheless, Lawrence is not here relegating women to an inferior position. Half of life is spent in the evening and night. Day belongs to the man, night to the woman. It is a division of labor. Lawrence is drawing here, as he frequently does, on traditional mythological themes: the man is solar, the woman lunar.

Lawrence characterizes the man’s pioneering activity as follows: “It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.” In other words, the man’s primary purpose is not having or doing any of the “practical” things that a wife and a family require. And when he acts on a larger scale—Lawrence gives building the Panama Canal as an example—it is not with the end in mind of making a world in which wives and babes can be more comfortable and secure (“a world for you, dear”). He seeks to make his mark on the world; to bring something glorious into existence. And so men create culture: games, religions, rituals, dances, artworks, poetry, music, and philosophy. Wars are fought, ultimately, for the same reason. It is probably true, as is often asserted, that every war has some kind of economic motivation. However, it is probably also true to assert that in the case of just about every actual war there was another, more cost-effective alternative. Men make war for the same reason they climb mountains, jump out of airplanes, race cars, and run with the bulls: for the challenge, and the fame and glory and exhilaration that goes with meeting the challenge. It is an aspect of male psychology that most women find baffling, and even contemptible.

Now, curiously, Lawrence refers to this “impractical,” purposive motive of the male as an “essentially religious or creative motive.” What can he mean by this? Specifically, why does he characterize it as a religious motive?

It is religious because it involves the pursuit of something that is beyond the ordinary and the familiar. It is a leap into the unknown. The man has to follow what Lawrence frequently calls the “Holy Ghost” within himself and to try to make something within the world. He yearns always for the yet-to-be, the yet-to-be-realized, and always has his eye on the future, on what is in process of coming to be. Yet there seems to be, at least on the surface, a strange inconsistency in Lawrence’s characterization of the man’s motive as religious. After all, for Lawrence the life mystery, the source of being is religious object—and women are closer to this source. Man is entranced by woman, and with her he helps to propagate this power in the world through sex, but his sense of “purpose” causes him to move away from the source. So why isn’t it the woman whose “motives” are religious, and the man who is, in effect, irreligious?

The answer is that religion is not being at the source: it is directedness toward the source. Religion is possible only because of a lack or an absence in the human soul. Religion is ultimately a desire to put oneself at-one with the source. But this is possible only if one is not, originally or most of the time, at one with it. In a way, the woman is not fundamentally religious because she is the goddess, the source herself. The sexual longing of the man for the woman, and his utter inability ever to fully satisfy his desire and to resolve the mystery that is woman, are a kind of small-scale allegory for man’s large-scale, religious relationship to the source of being itself. He is, as I have said, renewed by his relations with women and, for a time, satisfied. But then he goes forth into the world with a desire for something, something. He creates, and when he does he is acting to exalt the life mystery (religion and art), to understand it (philosophy and science), or to further it (invention and production).

Lawrence speaks of how a man must put his wife “under the spell of his fulfilled decision.” Woman, who rules over the night, draws man to her and they become one through sex. Man, who rules the day, draws woman into his purpose, his aim in life, and through this they become one in another fashion. The man’s purpose does not become the woman’s purpose. He pursues this alone. But if the woman simply believes in him and what he aims to do, she becomes a tremendous source of support for the man, and she gives herself a reason for being. The man needs the woman as center, as hub of his life, and the woman needs to play this role for some man. Without a mate, though a man may set all sorts of purposes before him, ultimately they seem meaningless. He feels a sense of hollow emptiness, and drifts into despair. He lets his appearance go, and lives in squalor. He may become an alcoholic and a misogynist. He dies much sooner than his married friends, often by his own hand. As to the woman, without a man who has set himself some purpose that she can believe in, she assumes the male role and tries to find fulfillment through some kind of busy activity in the world. But as she pursues this, she feels increasingly bitter and hard, and a terrific rage begins to seethe beneath her placid surface. She becomes a troublemaker and a prude. Increasingly angry at men, she makes a virtue of necessity and declares herself emancipated from them. She collects pets.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence writes:

As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force. She can’t help herself. A woman is almost always vulnerable to pity. She can’t bear to see anything physically hurt. But let a woman loose from the bounds and restraints of man’s fierce belief, in his gods and in himself, and she becomes a gentle devil.

If a woman is to be the hub in the life a man, and derive satisfaction from that, everything depends on the spirit of the man. A few lines later in the same text Lawrence states, “Unless a man believes in himself and his gods, genuinely: unless he fiercely obeys his own Holy Ghost; his woman will destroy him. Woman is the nemesis of doubting man.” In order for the woman to believe in a man, the man must believe in himself and his purpose. If he is filled with self-doubt, the woman will doubt him. If he lacks the strength to command himself, he cannot command her respect and devotion. And the trouble with modern men is that they are filled with self-doubt and lack the courage of their convictions.

Lawrence, following Nietzsche, in part blames Christianity for weakening modern, Western men. Men are potent—sexually and otherwise—to the extent they are in tune with the life force. But Christianity has “spiritualized” men. It has filled their heads with hatred of the body, and of strength, instinct, and vitality. It has infected them with what Lawrence calls the “love ideal,” which demands, counter to every natural impulse, that men love everyone and regard everyone as their equal.

Frequently in his fiction Lawrence depicts relationships in which the woman has turned against the man because he is, in effect, spiritually emasculated. The most dramatic and symbolically obvious example of this is the relationship of Clifford and Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clifford returns from the First World War paralyzed from the waist down. But like the malady of the Grail King in Wolfram’s Parzival, this is only (literarily speaking) an outward, physical expression of an inward, psychic emasculation. Clifford is far too sensible a man to allow himself to be overcome by any great passion, so the loss of his sexual powers is not so dear. He has a keen, cynical wit and believes that he has seen through passion and found it not as great a thing as poets say that it is. It is his spiritual condition that drives Connie away from him, not so much his physical one. And so she wanders into the game preserve on their estate (representing the small space of “wildness” that still can rise up within civilization) and into the arms of Mellors, the gamekeeper. Their subsequent relationship becomes a hot, corporeal refutation of Clifford’s philosophy.

In Women in Love, Gerald Crich, the industrial magnate, is destroyed by Gudrun essentially because he does not believe in himself. Outwardly, he is “the God of the machine.” But his mastery of the material world is meaningless busywork, and he knows it. Gudrun is drawn to him because of this outward appearance of power, but when she finds that it is an illusion she hates him, and ultimately drives him to his death. For Lawrence, this is an allegory of the modern relationship between the sexes. Men today are masters of the material universe as they have never been before, but inside they are anxious and empty. The reason is that these “materialists” are profoundly afraid of and hostile to matter and nature, especially their own. Their intellect and “will to power” has cut them off from the life force and they are, in their deepest selves, impotent. The women know this, and scorn them.

In The Rainbow, Winifred Inger is Ursula’s teacher (with whom she has a brief affair), and an early feminist. She tells Ursula at one point,

The men will do no more,–they have lost the capacity for doing. . . . They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don’t come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and they say “You are my idea,” so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man’s idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can’t take a woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that. They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled.”

It is important to understand here that the issue is not one of power. Lawrence’s point not that men must dominate or control their wives. In fact, in a late essay entitled “Matriarchy” (originally published as “If Women Were Supreme”) Lawrence actually advocates rule by women, at least in the home, because he believes it would liberate men. He assumes the truth of the claim—now in disrepute—that early man had lived in matriarchal societies and writes, “the men seem to have been lively sorts, hunting and dancing and fighting, while the woman did the drudgery and minded the brats. . . . A woman deserves to possess her own children and have them called by her name. As to the household furniture and the bit of money in the bank, it seems naturally hers.” The man, in such a situation, is not the slave of the woman because the man is “first and foremost an active, religious member of the tribe.” The man’s real life is not in the household, but in creative activity, and religious activity:

The real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meeting-house where only the males assemble, where the sacred practices of the tribe are carried on; then also he is away hunting, or performing the sacred rites on the mountains, or he works in the fields.

Men, Lawrence tells us, have social and religious needs which can only be satisfied apart from women. The disaster of modern marriage is that men not only think they have to rule the roost, but they accept the woman’s insistence that he have no needs or desires that cannot be satisfied through his relationship to her. He becomes master of his household, and slave to it at the same time:

Now [man’s] activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, and the reborn of woman. . . . Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings—nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original role of woman.

Ironically, in accepting such a situation without a fight, he only earns the woman’s contempt: “Almost invariably a [modern] married woman, as she passes the age of thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt, of her husband, or a pity which is near to contempt. Particularly if he is a good husband, a true modern.”

3. The Nature of Woman

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other’s game, but they will remain apart.” But what is meant by “feeling” here? Lawrence is referring again to his belief that women live, to a greater extent than men, from the primal self. In the case of most men today, “mind-consciousness” and reason are dominant—to the point where they are frequently detached from “blood-consciousness” and feeling.

In describing the nature of woman Lawrence once again draws on perennial symbols: “Woman is really polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull.” The sun represents man, and the moon woman. Day belongs to him, and night to her. However, another set of mythic images associates the earth with woman and the sky with man. The “pull” in women is towards the earth, and this means several things. First, the earth is the source of chthonic powers, and so, as poetic metaphor, it represents the primal, pre-mental, animal aspect in human beings. In a literal sense, however, Lawrence believes that women are more in tune than men with chthonic powers: with the rhythms of nature and the cycle of seasons. Further, the “downward flow” refers to Lawrence’s belief that the lower “centres” of the body are, in a sense, more primitive, more instinctual than the upper, and that women tend to live and act from these centers more than men do. Lawrence writes, “Her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. . . . The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet.”

Finally, to be “polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth” means to have one’s life, one’s vital being fixed in reference to a central point. If Lawrence intends us to assume that man is polarized upwards then we may ask, toward what? If woman is oriented towards the center of the earth, then–following the logic of the mythic categories–is man oriented toward the center of the sky? But the sky has no center. Man is less fixed than woman; he is a wanderer. He is a hunter, a seeker, a pioneer, an adventurer. Woman, on the other hand, lives from the axis of the world. Mircea Eliade writes that “the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World.” Woman is at the center. Man begins there, then goes off. He returns again and again, the phallic power in him rising in response to the chthonic power of the woman. And his religious response is an ongoing effort to bring his daytime self into line with the life force he experiences when in the arms of the woman.

Woman, Lawrence tells us, “is a flow, a river of life,” and this flow is fundamentally different from the man’s river. However, “The woman is like an idol, or a marionette, always forced to play one role or another: sweetheart, mistress, wife, mother.” The mind of the male is built to analyze and categorize. But the nature of woman, like the nature of nature itself, defies categorization. Even before Bacon, man’s response to nature was to force it to yield up its secrets, to bend it to the human will, or to see it only within the narrow parameters of whatever theory was fashionable at the moment. The male mind attempts to do this to woman as well–and the woman, to a great extent, cooperates. She fits herself into the roles expected of her by authority figures, whether it is dutiful daughter-sister-wife-mother, or dutiful feminist and career-woman.

Lawrence writes, “The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done.” Two opposing wills exist in women, Lawrence believes: a will to conform or to submit, and a will to reject all boundaries and be free. In Women in Love, Birkin compares women to horses:

“And of course,” he said to Gerald, “horses haven’t got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no one will. Every horse, strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human power completely—and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two wills sometimes lock—you know that, if ever you’ve felt a horse bolt, while you’ve been driving it. . . . And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

Ursula, who is present at this exchange, laughs and responds “Then I’m a bolter.” The trouble is that she is not.

Lawrence’s fiction is filled with vivid portrayals of women (arguably much more vivid and well-drawn than his portrayals of men). The central characters in several of his novels are women (The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). All of Lawrence’s major female characters exhibit these two wills, but frequently he presents pairs of women each of whom represents one of the wills. This is the case in Women in Love. Ultimately, in Ursula’s character the will to surrender emerges as dominant. In her sister Gudrun the will to be free and wild dominates, with tragic results. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie Chatterley exhibits the will to surrender, and her sister Hilda the will to be free. The two lesbians in Lawrence’s novella The Fox are cut from the same cloth. Similar pairs of women also crop up in Lawrence’s short stories. In each case, one woman learns the joys of submitting, not to a man but to the earth, to nature, to the life mystery within her. The man is a means to this, however. The best example of this in Lawrence’s fiction is probably Connie Chatterley’s journey to awakening. In John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence has Connie speak of the significance of her lover and of his penis: “I know it was the penis which really put the evening stars into my inside self. I used to look at the evening star, and think how lovely and wonderful it was. But now it’s in me as well as outside me, and I need hardly look at it. I am it. I don’t care what you say, it was penis gave it me.” As to the other woman in Lawrence’s fiction, she tends to be horrified by the primal self in her, and its call to surrender. She lives from the ego. She rages against anything in her nature that is unchosen, and against anything else that would hem her in, especially any man. She views herself as “realistic” and hardheaded, but the general impression she gives is of being hardhearted and sterile.

In his portrayals of the latter type of woman, Lawrence is partly depicting what he believes to be a perennial aspect of the female character, and partly depicting what he regards as the quintessential “modern” woman. It is in the nature of woman to counterbalance the will to submit with an opposing will that “bolts,” and kicks against all that which limits her, including her own nature. Lawrence believes that modern womanhood and all the problems of women today arise from the over-development of that will to freedom.

A “will to freedom” sounds like a good thing, so it is important to realize that essentially what Lawrence means by this is a negative will which tries either to control, or to destroy all that which it cannot control. Lawrence’s critique of modernity is a major topic in itself, but suffice it say that he believes that in the modern period a disavowal of the primal self takes place on a mass, cultural scale. The seeds of this disavowal were sown by Christianity, and reaped by modern scientism, which becomes the avowed enemy of the religion that helped foster it. Individuals live their lives from the standpoint of ego and mental-consciousness, and distrust the blood-consciousness. The negative will in women seizes upon reason and ego-dominance as a means to free herself from the influence of her dark, chthonic self, and from the influence of the men that this dark, chthonic self draws her to. The will to negate, using the mind as its tool, thus becomes the path to “liberation.”

Lawrence writes in Apocalypse:

Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange ‘spiritual’ creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape and be herself.

And in an essay he writes, “Woman is truly less free today than ever she has been since time began, in the womanly sense of freedom.” This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what is asserted by most pundits today, when they speak of the progress made by woman in the modern era. Why does Lawrence believe that woman is now so unfree? The answer is implied in the quotation from Apocalypse: she is not allowed to be herself.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence tells us

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.

What Lawrence says here is applicable to both men and women. “To be oneself” in the true sense means to answer to the call of the deepest self. We can only achieve our “fullness of being” if we do so. The mind invents all manner of goals and projects and ideals to be pursued, but ultimately all that we do produces only frustration and emptiness if we act in a way that does not fundamentally satisfy the needs of our deepest, pre-mental, bodily nature.

Lawrence writes further in Apocalypse: “The evil Logos says she must be ‘significant,’ she must ‘make something worth while’ of her life. So on and on she goes, making something worth while, piling up the evil forms of our civilization higher and higher, and never for a second escaping to be wrapped in the brilliant fluid folds of the new green dragon.” Earlier in the same text, Lawrence tells us that “The long green dragon with which we are so familiar on Chinese things is the dragon in his good aspect of life-bringer, life-giver, life-maker, vivifier.” In short, the “green dragon” represents the life force, the source of all, the Pan power. Lawrence is saying that modern woman, in search of something “significant” to do with her life, falls in with all the corrupt (largely, money-driven) pursuits that have brought men nothing but ulcers, emptiness, and early death. “All our present life-forms are evil,” he writes. “But with a persistence that would be angelic if it were not devilish woman insists on the best in life, by which she means the best of our evil life-forms, unable to realize that the best of evil life-forms are the most evil.” Like men, she loses touch with the natural both within herself and in the world surrounding her. Lawrence’s dragon symbolizes both of these: primal nature as such, and the primal nature within me. It is this dragon which Lawrence seeks to awake in himself, and in his readers. The tragedy of modern woman is that she has renounced the dragon, whereas she would be better off being devoured by it.

In John Thomas and Lady Jane Lawrence also links the ideal of fulfilled womanhood to the dragon. Following Connie Chatterley’s musings on the meaning of the phallus (which I quoted earlier), Lawrence writes:

The only thing which had taken her quite away from fear, if only for a night, was the strange gallant phallus looking round in its odd bright godhead, and now the arm of flesh around her, the socket of the hand against her breast, the slow, sleeping thud of the man’s heart against her body. It was all one thing—the mysterious phallic godhead. Now she knew that the worst had happened. This dragon had enfolded her, and its folds were pure gentleness and safety.

Make no mistake, Lawrence believes that women can adopt the ways of men; he believes that they can succeed at traditionally male work. But he believes that they do this at great cost to themselves. “Of all things, the most fatal to a woman is to have an aim,” Lawrence tells us. In general, he believes that the ultimate aim of life is simply living, and that we set a trap for ourselves when we declare that some goal or some ideal shall be the end of life, and believe that this will make life “meaningful.” This applies to men, but even more so to women. Why? Because, again, women are so much closer to the source that men tend to regard women as the life force embodied (“Mother Nature”). For a woman to live for something other than living is to pervert her nature, and her gift. Again, Lawrence’s position is not that a woman is incapable of doing the work of a man, but ultimately she will find it deadening: “The moment woman has got man’s ideals and tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly world—there’s an end of it. She’s had enough. She’s had more than enough. She hates the thing she has embraced.”

In our age, many women who have forgone marriage and children in order to pursue a career are discovering this. The body has its own needs and ends, and the organism as a whole cannot flourish and achieve satisfaction unless these needs and ends are satisfied. With some exceptions, women who have chosen not to have children regret it, and suffer in other ways as well (for example, they are at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than women who have given birth). The same goes for men, many of whom spend a great many “productive” years without feeling a need to reproduce–then are suddenly hit by that need and launch themselves on a frantic, sometimes worldwide search for a suitable mate able to father them a child. Lawrence wrote the following, prophetic words in one of his final essays:

It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. And when it has collapsed, and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes, or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency—suddenly, because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn into pure nothingness to her. Suddenly it all falls out of relation to her basic henny self, and she realizes she has lost her life. The lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every female, has been denied her: she had never had it. Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!

This quote suggests that Lawrence believes that the woman, the hen, ruins herself by taking up the ways appropriate and natural for the cock – but this is not exactly what he means. In Lawrence’s view, the modern ways of the cock are destroying the cock as well, but they are doubly bad for the hen. What’s bad for the gander is worse for the goose. Lawrence believes that in order to achieve satisfaction in life, we must get in touch with that primal self that the woman is fortunate enough always to be closer to.

4. A New Relation Between Man and Woman

So what is to be done? How are we to repair the damage that has been done in the modern world to the relation between the sexes? How are we to make men into men again, and women into women?

Lawrence has a great deal to say on this subject, but one of his oft-repeated recommendations essentially amounts to saying that relations between the sexes should be severed. By this he means that in order for men and women to come to each other as authentic men and women, they must stop trying to be “pals” with each other. In a 1925 letter he writes, “Friendship between a man and a woman, as a thing of first importance to either, is impossible: and I know it. We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half—say the delicate spiritual half alone—inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal.”

In order for men and women to be friends, they must deliberately put aside or suppress their sexual identities and their very different natures. They must actively ignore the fact that they are men and women. They relate to each other, in effect, as neutered, sexless beings. They can never truly relax around each other, for they must continually monitor the way that they look at each other or (more problematic) touch each other. Sitting in too close proximity could awaken feelings that neither wants awakened. If, with respect to their “daytime selves,” men and women are forced to relate to each other in this way regularly, it has the potential of wrecking the ability of the “nighttime self” to relate to the opposite sex in a natural, sensual manner. Once accustomed to the daily routine of suppressing thoughts and feelings, and taking great care never to show a sexual side to their nature, these habits carry over into the realm of the romantic and sexual. Dating and courtship become fraught with tension, each party unsure of the “appropriateness” of this or that display of sexual interest or simple affection. The man, in short, becomes afraid to be a man, and the woman to be a woman. “On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being ‘pals,’ they lose their own male and female integrity.” Writing of the modern marriage, Wendell Berry states

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

If we must suppress our masculine and feminine natures in order to be friends with the opposite sex, in what way then do we actually relate to each other? We relate almost entirely through the intellect. Lawrence writes, “Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are ‘pals.’” And: “We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer.” Modern men and women begin their relationships as sexless things who relate through ideas and speech. The man looks for a woman, or the woman for a man who thinks and talks as they do; who “knows where they are coming from,” and has “similar values.” They might as well not have bodies at all, or conduct the initial stages of their relationships by telephone or email. Indeed, that is exactly the way many modern relationships are now beginning. But the primary way men and women are built to relate to each other is through the body and the signals of the body; through the subtle, sexual “vibrations” that each gives off, through the sexual gaze (different in the male and in the female), and through touch. No real, romantic relationship can be forged without these, and without feeling through these non-mental means that the two are “right” for each other. We cannot start with “mental agreement” and then construct a sexual relationship around it.

Lawrence, like Rousseau, had a good deal to say about education, and in fact much of what he says is Rousseauian. His ideas on the subject are expressed chiefly in Fantasia of the Unconscious and in a long essay, “The Education of the People.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, in a chapter entitled “First Steps in Education,” Lawrence lays out a new program for educating girls and boys: “All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art. . . . All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labour, or of technical industry, or of art.” The difference between how boys and girls are to be educated (at least initially) is that whereas both are required to attend a “domestic workshop,” only boys are required to attend a “workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art.” Keep in mind that Lawrence is laying down the rules for education in his ideal society. He anticipates that whereas all males will work outside the home (in some fashion or other), not all females will. His system is not designed to force women into the role of homemakers, for he leaves it open that girls may, if they choose, learn the same skills as boys. As to higher education, Lawrence leaves this open: “Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree.” The system is designed in such a way that individuals are drawn to pursue certain avenues based on their personalities and natural temperaments. Unlike our present society, in Lawrence’s world there would be no universal pressure to attend university: only individuals with certain natural gifts and inclinations would go in that direction. Similarly, the system leaves open the possibility that some women will pursue the same path as men, but only if that is their natural inclination. The intent of Lawrence’s program is not to force individuals into certain roles, but to cultivate their natural, innate characteristics. And as we have seen, Lawrence believes that males and females are innately different.

Lawrence makes it clear elsewhere that in the early years education will be sex-segregated. This is intended to facilitate the development of each student’s character and talents. Males, especially early in life, relate more easily to other males and are better able to devote themselves to their studies in the absence of females. The same thing applies to females. Sex-segregated education in the early years also has the advantage, Lawrence believes, of promoting a healthier interaction between males and females later on. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he states, “boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally.” After all, “You don’t find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky.”

But this is, of course, all in the realm of fantasy. Lawrence’s system would be practical, if modern society could be entirely restructured, and he is aware that this is not likely to occur anytime soon. So what are we to do in the meantime? Here we encounter some of Lawrence’s most controversial ideas, and most inflammatory prose. He writes, “men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes.” It is this sort of thing that has made Lawrence a bête noire of feminists. Yet, in the next sentence, he adds “Wives, do the same to your husbands.” Lawrence’s intention, as always, is to destroy the ego-centredness in both husband and wife; to destroy the modern tendency for men and women to relate to each other, and to themselves, through ideas and ideals.

As a man and a husband, however, he writes primarily from that standpoint: “Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she’s stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her, Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying.” Does he mean any of this literally? Is he advocating that husbands beat their wives? Perhaps. Lawrence and Frieda were famous for their quarrels, which often came to blows, though the blows were struck by both. Lawrence states the purpose of such “beatings” (whether literal or figurative) as follows: “Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she’s got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into her own true unconscious.”

As we have already seen, Lawrence believes that healthy relations between a man and a woman depend largely on the man’s ability to make the woman believe in him, and the purpose he has set for himself in life. Sex unites the “nighttime self” of men and women, but the daytime self can only be united, for Lawrence, through the man’s devotion to something outside the marriage, and the woman’s belief in the man. This is just the same thing as saying that what unites the lives of men and women (as opposed to their sexual natures) is the woman’s belief in the man and his purpose. And so Lawrence writes:

You’ve got to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You’ll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. . . . She’ll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She’ll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark. . . . Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. . . . And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification of her embrace. That’s what it is to have a wife.

Friends of Lawrence must have smiled when they read these words, for he was hardly giving an accurate description of his own marriage. As I have mentioned, Lawrence and Frieda frequently fell into violent quarrels, and she would often demean and humiliate him, and he her. Yet, ultimately, Frieda believed in Lawrence’s abilities and his mission in life; he knew it and derived strength from it. Those who may think that Lawrence’s prescriptions for marriage require an extraordinarily submissive and even unintelligent wife should take note of the sort of woman Lawrence himself chose.

Now, some might respond to Lawrence’s description of marriage by asking, understandably, “Where is love in all of this? What has become of love between man and wife?” Yet Lawrence speaks again and again, especially in Women in Love, of love between man and wife as a means to wholeness, as a way to transcend the false, ego-centered self. In a 1914 letter he tells a male correspondent:

You mustn’t think that your desire or your fundamental need is to make a good career, or to fill your life with activity, or even to provide for your family materially. It isn’t. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security, no matter how many things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work, a real independent workman.

Initially in these remarks Lawrence seems to be taking a position different from the one he expressed in the later Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he asserts that the man derives his chief fulfillment from purpose, not from the home and family. But Lawrence’s position is complex. He believes that the man requires a relationship to a woman in order to be strengthened in the pursuit of his purpose. Recall the lines I quoted earlier, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” Man fulfills himself through having a purpose beyond the home, but he must have a home and a wife to support him. Through romantic love (which always involves a strong sexual component) the man comes to his primal self, and emerges from the encounter with the strength to carry on in the world. Lawrence is telling his correspondent—and this becomes clear in the last lines of the passage quoted—that in order to accomplish anything meaningful he must first submerge himself, body and soul, into love for his wife.

Of course, this makes it sound as if Lawrence regards married love merely as a means to an end: merely as a means to pursuing a male “purpose.” Elsewhere, however, he speaks of it as if it were an end in itself. This is particularly the case in Women in Love. Early in the novel Birkin tells Gerald, “I find . . . that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. . . . The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.” Again, Lawrence is seeking a way to get beyond idealism, and all the corrupt apparatus of modern, ego-driven life. To get beyond this, to what? To the true self, and to relationships based upon blood-consciousness and honest, uncorrupted sentiment. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s plan for achieving this involves a “perfect union” with a woman (and, as he states in the same novel, “the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage”).

Birkin wants to achieve this with Ursula, but he keeps insisting over and over (much to her bewilderment and anger) that he means something more than mere “love.” The reason for this is that Birkin and Lawrence associate “love” with an ideal that is drummed into the heads of people in the modern, post-Christian world. We are issued with the baffling injunction to “love thy neighbor,” where thy neighbor means all of humanity. Any intelligent person can see that to love everyone means to love no one in particular. And any psychologically healthy person would find valueless the “love” of someone who claimed also to love all the rest of humanity. Lawrence is reacting also against the lovey-dovey, white lace, sanitized, billing and cooing sort of “love” that society encourages in married couples. Lawrence’s disgust for this sort of thing is expressed in his short story “In Love.” The main character, Hester, is repulsed by the “love” her fiancé, Joe, shows for her. They had been friends prior to their engagement and got on well

But now, alas, since she had promised to marry him, he had made the wretched mistake of falling “in love” with her. He had never been that way before. And if she had known he would get this way now, she would have said decidedly: Let us remain friends, Joe, for this sort of thing is a come-down. Once he started cuddling and petting, she couldn’t stand him. Yet she felt she ought to. She imagined she even ought to like it. Though where the ought came from, she could not see.

Birkin (like Lawrence) wants to avoid at all costs falling into this sort of scripted, stereotyped love relationship, but Ursula has a great deal of difficulty understanding what it is that he does want. He tries his best to explain it to her:

“There is,” he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, “a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”

The “final me and you” refers to the primal self. “The old ideals are dead as nails” and so is modern civilization. Birkin does not want his relationship to Ursula to “fit” into the modern social scheme, to become conventional or “safe.” He also fears and abhors the impress of society on his conscious, mental self. He does not want to come together with Ursula “though the ego,” as it were. He wants them to come together through their primal selves and to forge a relationship that is based on something deeper and far stronger than what the overly socialized creatures around him call “love.” Yet, at the same time, one could simply say that what he wants is a truer, deeper love, and that what passes for love with other people is usually not the genuine article. They are doing what one “ought” to do, even when in bed together.

In The Rainbow (to which Women in Love forms the “sequel”), Tom Brangwen offers his views on love and marriage in a famous passage:

“There’s very little else, on earth, but marriage. You can talk about making money, or saving souls. You can save your own soul seven times over, and you may have a mint of money, but your soul goes gnawin’, gnawin’, gnawin’, and it says there’s something it must have. In heaven there is no marriage. But on earth there is marriage, else heaven drops out, and there’s no bottom to it. . . . If we’ve got to be Angels . . . and if there is no such thing as a man or a woman among them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel. . . . [An] Angel can’t be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a human being. . . . An Angel’s got to be more than a human being. . . . So I say, an Angel is the soul of a man and a woman in one: they rise united at the Judgment Day, as one angel. . . . If I am to become an Angel, it’ll be my married soul, and not my single soul.”

À la Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, men and women form two halves of a complete human being. Human nature divides itself into two, complementary aspects: masculinity and femininity. A complete human being is made when a man and a woman are joined together. But they cannot be joined—not really—through the mental, social self, but only through the unconscious, primal self.

In Women in Love, this view returns but in a modified form. Now Birkin tells us, “One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.” And Lawrence tells us of Birkin, “he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.” Tom Brangwen’s view implies that men and women, considered separately, do not have complete souls, and that a complete soul is made only when they join together in marriage. There is a suggestion in what he says that the “individuality” of single men and women is false, and that only a married couple constitutes a true individual. Birkin’s ideal, on the other hand, involves the man and the woman each preserving their selfhood and individuality and “balancing” each other.

Despite the fact that Birkin frequently, and transparently, speaks for Lawrence we cannot take him as speaking for Lawrence here. I believe that it is Brangwen’s position that is closest to Lawrence’s own. When Women in Love opens, Birkin is in a relationship with Hermione, who Lawrence portrays as a woman living entirely from out of her head, without any naturalness or spontaneity. Yet there is a bit of this in Birkin as well, which is perhaps why he reacts against it so violently when he sees it in Hermione. After the passage just quoted from Women in Love, Lawrence writes of Birkin, “He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. . . . And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.” Lawrence then goes on to describe Birkin’s fear and loathing of women’s “clutching.” Birkin is a conflicted character. He wants to lose himself in a relationship with a woman, but fears it at the same time. He wants Ursula, and talks on and on about spontaneity and the evil of ideals, yet he is continually preaching to Ursula about his ideal relationship which, conveniently, is one in which he can unite with her yet preserve his ego intact. This at first bewilders then infuriates Ursula, who never understands what it is that he wants. In the end, the problem resolves itself, probably just as it would in real life. Drawn to Ursula by a power stronger than his conscious ego, Birkin eventually drops all of his talk, surrenders his will, and settles into a married bliss that is marred only by his continued desire for the love of a man.

Ultimately, Lawrence believes that the “establishment of a new relation” between men and women depends upon a return to the oldest of relationships, and that this is possible only through a recovery of the oldest part of the self. We must, he believes, drop our ideal of the unisex society and be alive again to the fundamental, natural differences between men and women. Men and woman do not naturally desire to enjoy each other’s society at all times. We must not only educate men and women apart, but re-establish “spaces” within civilized society where men can be with men, and women with women. We must not force men and women together and command them to forget that they are men and women. Education and, indeed, much else in society must work to cultivate and to affirm the natural, masculine qualities and virtues in men, and the feminine qualities and virtues in women. Having become true men and women and having awakened, through their apartness, to the mystery and the allure that is the opposite sex, they will then come together and forge romantic alliances that are not based upon talk and “common values” but upon the “pull” between man and woman. Lawrence is not referring here simply to lust. A sexual element is, of course, involved, but what he means is the mysterious, ineffable attraction between an individual man and a woman, what we often call “chemistry,” which has nothing to do with the words they utter or the ideals they pay lip service to. And once this attraction is established, if the two desire to become bound to each other, then they must surrender themselves to the relationship. They must overcome their fear of the loss of ego boundaries. They must drop all talk of “rights” and not fall into the trap of treating the marriage as if it were a business partnership. For both, it is a leap into the unknown but in this case the unknown is the natural. When we plant a seed we must close the earth over it and go off and wait in anticipation. But we know that nature, being what it is, will produce as it has before. If all goes well, in that spot will grow the plant we were expecting. Similarly, marriage is not a human invention but something that grows naturally between a man and woman if its seed is planted in the fertile soil of the primal selves of each.